


Heroic Vulgar

by Sleepmarshes



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Alcohol, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Language, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-08 23:35:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11657007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sleepmarshes/pseuds/Sleepmarshes
Summary: Childhood friends torn apart by distance, Maka is suddenly reunited with her first crush in the Albarn family's pet shop. She needs an employee, and Black Star needs a job... but also a place to stay. A new tenant in the house, exotic bird theft, and big-name petfood companies turn the shop upside down, but now that she has her best friend back, Maka thinks she can get through anything-- if her heart would simply shut up. Also if Fred would shut up. Please shut up, Fred.A K-drama AU for Reverb 2017, written for my partners l0chn3ss and uppastmybedtimereading316





	1. TAKE OUT THE TRASH!!!

**Author's Note:**

> (i can not pretend to claim that any of this has any accurate basis in the real world whatsoever)  
> (also some 50% OFF! references, a nod to a mango i read once, a couple of tumblr memes, and whatever i gleaned from the nevada department of agriculture website >....> )  
> (DO YOUR RESEARCH BEFORE YOU MAKE PET FOOD OK)
> 
> thank you, i hope u have a nice day

Locking the front door to the shop, Maka straightens the Help Wanted sign in the window, guilt making a wry twist of her mouth.

“You’re lucky I was in the neighborhood,” says Kid, safely shutting the last kennel. “You need to hire someone sooner than later.”

 _“I know,”_ she grouses. Her head thunks against on the window in defeat. “Everyone’s too incompetent.”

“You’re picky.”

Maka whirls around with a hiss. “I don’t wanna hear that from _you._ And anyway, the last guy I fired was feeding rotten food to the puppies! There were _bugs._ ”

Dispensing an obscene amount of sanitizer into his palms, Kid rubs his hands together and says, “I concede he was scum and deserved to be fired.” And before Maka can puff up with pride, he adds, “But you also broke his nose.”

Steel-toed boots have that effect on a face. She has nothing to say in reply, so begins turning off the shop’s lights and following him to the back door, grumbling under her breath.

As a friend from junior college and well-versed in her hot-headed habits, Kid picks up his briefcase and navigates his way through the shop and into the connecting house. “Word of the violent pet shop owner has made around the neighborhood, I imagine?”

Maka drags her feet through the living room. “Technically, I’m the manager, not the owner.”

Completely disenchanted, he replies, “Tomato idiom,” instead of just _saying_ the damned idiom. “Hopefully someone who can meet your standards will drop in soon.”

“Hopefully,” she says, holding open the front door as he walks out into the encroaching night. “Thanks again for the help.”

“I’d say ‘anytime’, but it is very untrue.” He gives a bland wave in farewell, his sedan parked in the street lighting up and faithfully unlocking for him. “But call me if you must. I know how it is.”

\\\\\

How It Is: Maka Albarn loves animals. Animals do not love Maka Albarn.

Being the daughter of a pet-shop owner, she’s grown up with a menagerie in her palm and the belief that pets are pure and all that is good in the world. And though she would do anything for a creature in need, they want nothing to do with her. At best, the residents of the pet shop occasionally tolerate Maka picking them up to be handed to a customer or deposited into one of the many roomy pockets of her work apron. More often than not, however, they are so uniformly uncooperative that the neighborhood simply believes conspiracies and curses were afoot when Maka Albarn was born. Petting zoos are a pipe dream -- she can hardly get the animals back in their cages, let alone show them her undying affections.

Hence the need for another employee -- one who preferably has more than zero animal-whispering skill points.

Maka tries not to dwell on it, putting tomorrow’s worries out of mind as she grabs leftover pizza from the fridge and marches up the stairs to her bedroom. Even if the shop is closed, there’s still work to be done. Those angry letters to Parallax Petfoods won’t write themselves; the night is young.

She slowly works on the pizza crust hanging out of her mouth while sitting in her desk chair and booting up her laptop. As she waits for the machine to wake up, the glow of the screen casts light on her little desk calendar which states that it is Friday. Full moon. And, in electric-blue marker, her handwriting in urgent capitals: TAKE OUT THE TRASH!!!

“Ah--” This is her only chance to dispose of the several pounds of bug-filled puppy chow quarantined in the deep freezer before the garbage service comes in the morning. Maka chews with haste, returning downstairs to retrieve the unholy calamity that is rotten kibble from big name companies.

She’s not weak or frail by any stretch of the imagination, but for someone as small as Maka Albarn to carry and balance multiple sacks of frozen dog food -- all at once, naturally, because to take more than one trip would be a form of _defeat_ \-- is rather treacherous. They’re stacked clear over her head, blocking her vision.

Out on the curb, just within reach of the garbage can, one of the bags starts sliding from her arms. She makes a frantic grab for it, which only causes everything else to fall with a spectacular clatter, the trash can knocked over in the process.

Maka tilts her head back to look at the moon, which appears to be mocking her in some lunar fashion. That angry letter to Parallax gains a new paragraph in her mind. Standing amidst the rubbish, she swears, watching the garbage can lid continue to roll across the otherwise quiet street and hit the curb on the other side with all the obnoxiousness of a cymbal crash.

Sucking in a garbage-tainted breath, she stuffs all the bags into the can and stomps across the street for the AWOL lid. The property on this side of the street is a miniature park-- a place oft-visited by new owners of the pets from her family’s shop. There’s a tiny wishing fountain, one bench, a moderate patch of grass, and The Tree.

The Tree is a gnarled thing, like a great-uncle, limbs bigger than she is around forking from its center. It’s a focal point of her life, much like the shop. She and her friend from elementary school would race to the top, cawing like parrots.

Silvery moonlight filters through its lush leaves, and as Maka reaches down to retrieve the garbage lid, she sees a tall woman standing at the foot of The Tree, staring up into it with a quiet intensity.

Then, with a voice like a bell, the woman says, “I’m not catching you, sir.”

Maka blinks. The Tree replies, “What, don’t wanna gently cradle me in your loving arms?”

“Yes. The terms of my contract include preventing you from damaging property, but not yourself.”

“Your loyalty sounds pretty specifically limited, Tsu.” The Tree rustles, and Maka leans forward to catch a glimpse of the speaker: an expensive-looking pair of wingtip boots.

“I’ll follow you to the moon, sir,” the woman easily says, “but you’ll have to walk there, yourself.”

“Yeah, yeah. Catch this thing, then,” he replies.

The woman extends her hands to the leaves to receive ‘this thing’, and then Maka hears the familiar, squeaking cry of a kitten. With a gasp, she drops the garbage can lid, which startles the woman by the tree. “Ack! _Sorry,”_ she stage-whispers from the curb.

“What’s goin’ on down there?” asks The Tree, creaking and rattling. “Animal going through the trash?”

Trying her best to not look suspicious at night, Maka waves nervously as she joins the woman. “It was just me. There was... an accident-is-that-your-cat?” she asks, unable to stop herself. “Sorry, I work at the pet shop across the street, and I overheard--”

“ _Pet sh_ -” The Tree exclaims before cracking like a gunshot. Next to Maka, the woman with the kitten side-steps away as effortless and silent as a shadow.

Maka looks up.

The next twenty seconds-- which Maka refers to as The Moment The Universe Increased The Difficulty Level Of Life -- occur precisely so:

A branch falls away, revealing the moon overhead. A man, as if crashing to Earth from space, plummets like a rock before Maka’s feet in a flurry of leaves and twigs.

“Urgh,” says the man, spitting leaves.

 _“Oh my GOD--”_ Crouching with worry, Maka ends up with her hands stuck in suspension halfway to the stranger, unsure how to help. “Um??” She glances between the man and woman several times, though the latter fails to look the least bit concerned as she cuddles the kitten to her chest. “D-do you need a doctor?”

“Nah, I’m great!” The man sits up, pulling a leafy branch away from his face. She can’t help but notice he’s wearing a rumpled suit. He cheerily says, “Hey Shortbarn.”

“Hi,” she responds, automatic. Then pauses, exchanging eye contact with the stranger on the ground for a mind-warping moment, puzzle pieces of recognition fitting together as she stares into his face.

Maka bolts upright, nearly leaping backward. “Black Star?”

He salutes with a maddeningly casual tilt of his hand before spitting leaves again. “Shop still open?”

\\\

“There was no sign of the rest of the litter, or the mother,” Tsubaki says, raptly watching the kitten destroy the small mound of wet cat food on a paper plate.

Black Star checks for any leftover tree debris in his hair. Being in the Albarn household’s kitchen makes him _itchy_ \-- or maybe it’s from the burning questions in Maka’s face. He doesn’t blame her curiosity, seeing as the last time he was here he’d been two feet shorter, brunette, and her best friend.

Still, he refuses to display any of that discomfort, instead grinning bright and saying, “I remember how cold it gets here at night, so I went on a rescue mission.”

Maka crosses her arms, gaze drawn to the kitten. “Do you have room for her?”

He and Tsubaki exchange a silent look. Black Star carefully answers, “I don’t have anything.”

The look Maka shoots him over her shoulder would only be more skeptical if he had told her the _entire_ truth, so he bears it with a smile.

“She can stay here the night, but not in the petshop.” Maka scoots around him to open the cabinet under the sink, pulling out one of many flattened cardboard boxes stashed there. “You’ll have to find a shelter for her soon. And someone will need to take care of her while I’m working.”

“I can do it,” he blurts.

Her left eyebrow arches high, a talent she’d acquired when she was old enough to be unimpressed by her weird-ass dad. As she hands Black Star the box, he’s struck by how _short_ she is, now. “You,” she says, like he’s told a lame joke.

“Yeah me, animals love me! More than you, anyway.”

Maka appears to have suddenly bitten into something sour. Behind her, Tsubaki makes an urgent face at Black Star, air-decapitating herself with a hand.

Turning on a heel, (and Tsu quickly returning to observing the kitten), Maka flatly replies, “That’s true.”

He feels he has tripped over something, and assumes it’s the hole he’s dug for himself.

This is when Tsubaki’s beeper goes off, which startles both the cat and Maka. She stands from the table, adjusting her blazer. “Well. I must be going, or I’ll be late to my part-time job.”

“At--” Maka whirls to find the time on the microwave, “-- _midnight?_ ”

Tsubaki wears her textbook generic smile.

“...I thought you were like, his bodyguard or butler or something.”

Waving a hand with a laugh, as if the very thought is absurd, Tsubaki replies, “Oh no, only on weekdays.” She then turns to Black Star and gives a short bow. “Until Monday,” she says.

“Later,” he replies, unfolding the cardboard box and trying to lock the bottom flaps together.

After Maka shows Tsubaki out of the house, she returns to the kitchen with the kitten propped against her chest. “I’m surprised she’s the only one with you. You used to have a whole troupe following you around.”

Black Star sets the box on the floor near the refrigerator with a laugh. “Things are… a little different now.” When he looks back and finds her eyebrows scrunched together, he says, “Uh, is this not where it goes? Put it here out of habit--” Because the warm side of the fridge was where they’d always kept the strays they picked up when they were kids.

“It’s fine,” she murmurs, stepping forward with the kitten. “Get a towel from the hall closet?”

It takes a moment to orientate, but he gets his rusty bearings and finds an old beach towel. She folds this with practiced ease, giving the kitten a temporary bed. The both of them crouch beside the box, and when he reaches down to pat the kitten on the head, it promptly gnaws on his finger instead.

Maka levels him with her dark green stare. “I have a lot of things I want to say to you, but it’s late, and I have to open the shop in the morning.” She rocks back on her heels a bit. “You’ll really come tomorrow?”

His right hand gets in a wrestling match with the cat. “Of course. I said I would.”

“She needs a lot of attention,” she says, fingers tapping on her bent knees. “You can’t just show up once and disappear.”

Black Star smiles, though it feels a bit brittle. “Leave it to me,” he says.

Standing abruptly, Maka crosses her arms and looks down her little nose at him. “Fine. Seven AM. Don’t be late or I’ll kick your ass and knock that stupid dye out of your hair.”

He stands as well, though her expression is just as no-nonsense looking up at him as down. “You don’t like it??”

Maka blinks, considering his hair an extra three seconds. “It looks like Fred.”

“Fr-- _who?”_ he asks, but she’s turned on a heel and on a direct route for the door. “Who is _Fred?”_

“Time’s up,” she says, opening the door. “Get out.”

Ah-- right. The streetlamp-glow of the night greets him, and he abruptly remembers his present predicament. He inches his way to the threshold, but turns at the last second to ask, “Hey, Maks, I--”

But she makes the tiniest movement, leaning closer to the door -- most likely an unconscious effort -- but it makes him paste that strained smile back on his face, because she had never been on guard around him their entire childhood, and it stings just a little.

“You?” she asks.

“AAAuuh, I. Wanna. Thank you? For this. Thanks.”

“It’s fine, for now,” she replies, though her foot taps a few times on the door behind her, the only evidence of his gratitude flustering her. “...How long will you be in town?”

Black Star scrubs the back of his head, the grin a lot more genuine. “Indefinitely? Haha.”

She smiles back, and it unravels something in his chest. “Goodnight, Star.” And then she gives him a playful shove out the door, shutting it in his face.

He nearly flies off the porch in joy-- but then realizes how _chilly_ it is, outside.

“Balls,” says Black Star.


	2. SMOKE THAT FUCKER

Seeing the heir to Parallax Enterprises while writing an angry email to the company’s pet food division feels like a weird dream, or maybe an overdramatic TV show. But when Maka comes down the stairs and finds the kitten curled nose to tail in the cardboard box, she determines it all must have been real.

If he really meant what he said, Black Star will be back to take care of the kitten in half an hour. The way she fumbles with her coffee cup and spills it across the counter tells her how she really feels about _that_. She hadn’t seen him since middle school, spirited off by his family’s company without so much as a text or inappropriate eggplant emoji.

Now, at 21, he just… _shows up?_ Like he’s never left?

With blue hair??

She should have punched him. Or hugged him? She huffs at the mess on the counter, confused. She’d stayed up even later to write Angry Emails to Parallax and isn’t in the right frame of mind to linger on thoughts about how Black Star doesn’t look anything like the kid he used to be.

After a successful cup of coffee and checking up on the snoozing kitten, Maka is surprised to see Spirit already in the shop, feeding the birds which wait for him like a line of soldiers. She yawns, grabbing her apron off a peg on the wall.

“Didn’t know you came home,” she says.

Her father smiles, though his eyes are askance. “Ah, I didn’t, exactly--” he admits, and she takes in his rumpled yesterday’s-clothes and overnight stubble.

She sighs and tugs the apron over her head.

“But I wanted to come home and freshen up the Brigade!” he says, shaking a container of homemade treats into his hand. The resident parakeets and parrots all give their undivided attention.

“Mmm.” Maka ties her apron and begins loading up a rolling cart of pet food for the animals’ breakfast. “What’re you teaching them this time?”

“Just a refresher course. Proximity alarms and whatnot.” Spirit drops his voice to a lower register, points a finger at a bird, and says, _“What’s your sign, cutie?”_

The yellow-green parakeet tilts its head a moment, considering, before it replies with, “Back off, fucko.”

While Papa rewards the bird, Maka shovels another scoop of puppy chow into a bucket, bemused. “And what prompted this urgent lesson at seven in the morning?”

“The zoos want me to give a few seminars so I’ll be out of town for a week. Can’t have the Albarn Guard getting rusty.”

“Papa, I’m more than capable of--”

“I know you are,” Spirit says just as easily, feeding the birds. “You’re my strong warrior-daughter, and I am proud of you. But there were _vagrants_ in the park this morning! Can you believe it? Anyone would want to protect their child from gangsters, no matter how strong she is.”

Pausing while scooping kibble, Maka does not mention how she brought over strangers from the park she’d met in the middle of the night and let them in the house. Warriors pick their battles.

Spirit wipes his now-empty hands on his pants. “I don’t wanna leave you by yourself with no part-timers, but I’m sure the shop is safe in my babygirl’s hands,” he says, beaming at her.

Her chest constricts a bit. “It’s all right. If I need help I’m sure Kid will come.”

Papa nods. “I gotta pack up and go. Fred’s waiting for you in the back.” Maka accepts the customary kiss on the forehead, waving him out of the shop.

\\\

After feeding the animals and performing the rest of her morning routine, she sits at the counter with Fred, seething, because it is 7:32 in the morning, and Black Star is late.

“Punch. Definitely punch,” she says aloud, munching on a carrot she’d filched from the fresh veggie pile reserved for the bunnies.

“Right in the gonads,” adds Fred.

“Yeah!”

“Yeah.”

_“Yeah.”_

This is when the bell on the pet shop’s door jingles, which consequently sets off every puppy in the building. “Welcome to the Albarn Barnyard,” she greets loudly over the din, automatic and cheerful. Leaning forward to look around the register, her eyes are drawn to the bright, glossy red of the Help Wanted sign. Held by Black Star.

Black Star in, “Weren’t you wearing that yesterday?”’s suit, wrinkled and skewed to the right.

“Yeah,” he replies, unfazed. “Hire me?”

The puppies are messing with her ears. “What?”

“I mean, good morning? You should hire me!” He wobbles the sign in her direction.

**“What?”**

“I’m great with animals!”

\\\

“Oh my god,” Maka says, a hand covering her face, “ _you’re the vagrant.”_

Black Star slides the Help Wanted sign on the counter so he can go stick his fingers in the doors of the puppy kennels, and laughs when he gets snuffled all over. “Is that a fancy title for a hobo? ‘Cause yeah, that bench sucks to sleep on.”

“Why are you _smiling_ when you say that??”

“I ran away from home!” he announces, chest puffed for a glorious three seconds before deflating. “So hire the great me. Please. Also, if you have a spare dog igloo or something I would like to rent it out because I don’t have a place to stay.” 

Looking over his shoulder, he sees Maka’s face scrunch up with deep thought-- maybe calculating the going rate for dog-gloos-- but she eventually stands up from her stool and walks to the other end of the counter. With a frown, she says, “You’re already half an hour late,” and ducks down out of sight.

“Yeah, I sold the Rolex to get some tacos at Jack in the Box… my bad. How’s the kitten?”

Green eyes peer over the counter with suspicion. “How can you _eat_ those th-- whatever. The kitten is fine, but you need to go feed her. And also,” she stands, slapping a paper on the countertop, “I can’t hire you.”

Damn. Well, nothing is worth not trying. He’s only been away from Parallax for a week-- he can’t let this get him down. “Alright. But I’ll still take care of Thugnificent, I’m a god of my word.”

“Thugn--” Maka clamps a hand over her mouth, but Black Star still hears the snort that escapes from behind it. She gives him a sideways glance, looking faintly betrayed by her own amusement. The smile is still there when she drops the hand. “I _meant,_ I can’t hire you until you fill this out,” she says, pushing the paper on the counter towards him. “So go take care of _Thugnificent,_ and fill out the application.”

Black Star pulls away from the puppy kennels, hope adding ten inches to his height. “You’ll hire me?”

Idly adjusting the neck strap of her apron, she looks askance and says, “Papa’s out of town for the week so you can stay here until then, I g-- AAAH!”

He’s already sprinted to her, vaulting over the counter with a mighty **WHOOP!** to open his arms wide and crush her in a hug he’s missed for the past several years. As he crows how she is the absolute best, he notices two things:

One: It’s not that he was trying to cop a feel or anything, but he’s off-handedly becoming acquainted with her chest in this moment, and it’s a surprisingly more stacked than it had looked last night. Also kind of... lumpy?

Two: Her chest sounds an ear-shattering alarm, an unearthly voice booming from beneath her apron. It roars, “FECK OFF YA WEE BASTARD!!”

Black Star stumbles away, Maka cringing and holding her lumpy tits. She rolls her eyes until she looks in need of an exorcism -- and judging by that wriggling third boob, maybe a _few_ exorcisms -- while her chest shouts,  “PERIMETER BREACH. WEEOO WEEOO WEEOO PERIMETER BREACH. SMOKE THAT FUCKER. WEEOO WEE--”

“Are… you okay, dude?”

Face like a ripe tomato, she says, “At ease, Fred!”

Her chest makes a series of quick security beeps reminiscent of Black Star’s chauffeur’s car.

Well. Ex-chauffeur now, but more importantly, “Are you wearing a military-grade security bra or did you _name your tits_ _Fred_ ,” and that’s when he’s roundhouse kicked in the solar plexus. She’s gotten stronger-- it kind-of tickles! He’s laughing when he passes out.

\\\

He’s certain it’s pretty damn ungodly to turn up on Maka’s doorstep smelling like he’d run away from home eight days ago, and Black Star had **not** wanted his first impression after twelve years to be “ _you smell like a vagrant, take a bath_ ,” which is what the post-it he finds on his face says. 

Well, what’s done is done. The post-it kind of smells like it’s been in a bag of gerbil bedding. Black Star sits up, finding himself half-sprawled off the couch, like Maka had given up dragging him there during delivery. The last thing he can concretely remember is Maka’s chest swearing like a rap festival.

After he feeds and bathes Thugnificent, digs around the kitchen to find a glitter-sharpie, and fills out his job application with aforementioned glitter-sharpie, Black Star tromps up the stairs to the bathroom, eager to get out of his eight-day-old Armani suit and into possibly the best shower/tub combo in the world, even without fancy Italian tile. 

Hah! His father would perish at the thought. Black Star greets the array of showerheads like walking into a party thrown just for him (though actually meant for power-washing the furriest of dogs). However, it’s not until after he’s out of the tub and flexing at his steamy reflection that he realizes he doesn’t have any spare clothes. Also he’d neglected to grab a towel out of the linen closet.

He’s had hired attendants for the past twelve years. He’s rusty.

Armed with his tremendous power of will, and a single, decorative hand towel-- the themed kind one isn’t supposed to use, even if it’s embroidered with Christmas trees and pudgy Santas and it is September-- he drapes Christmas over his (godly) treasures and strolls out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam. The linen closet had a stack of unused bedsheets, and he can probably make a baller toga out of them. 

It’s chilly outside the safety of the bathroom, so his leisurely stroll becomes more of a squeaking, tip-toeing sprint to the closet down the hall, which he flings open and certainly does not cower behind for warmth. 

“Did you really have to fill this out in glitter-marker **oh--”**

Black Star looks around the open door to find Maka halfway up the stairs, paused mid-everything. 

Gods do not blush. In fact, they flex their glutes self-consciously. “Forgot a towel. D’you have anything I can wear?”

For at least a good two seconds, Maka’s eyes shoot down to his exposed ass before she slaps a hand over her eyes. “NAKED,” she blurts, only to immediately gasp and say, “No! Wait! I didn’t mean--”

And then a salmon-pink, feathered **demon of the apocalypse** bursts out of the top of her apron, barking like a 200-pound mastiff, and launches itself directly at Black Star’s face.

Thus proceeds four minutes and ten seconds of running around the house from some kind of attack bird, with shrinkage of godlike proportions.

\\\

“He’s my chastity bird,” she says, absently gesturing to the cockatoo. Black Star nearly asks ‘what-titty-bird’, but he’s mostly naked in the vicinity of aforementioned titty-whatever, and also steel-toed boots. “Sorry. He has a lot of active triggers and I forget sometimes.” Maka digs through her dresser for her largest nightgown, because he had refused any of her dad’s clothes-- mostly because that was friggen _weird_ , but also because they all stunk of cheap cologne and being the heir of a major conglomerate had instilled in him certain standards. 

The nightgown is covered in tiny scottish terriers. It fits him like a tight dress one would wear to a bar, hugging his ass and seam-creakingly tight across the shoulders. He’s mostly sure his balls aren’t hanging out, but makes a kilt from a few pillowcases just for anti-Fred protection. 

“I’m impressed. I’ve never had a duel with a bird before.”

Maka wears the very blandest of expressions when she looks over her shoulder. “Is it considered a duel when you run away and hide behind the vacuum cleaner?” Still, she glances at one of the many built-in perches made to accommodate her bodyguard, and warily adds, “Just don’t hug me and he shouldn’t come at you again. Probably.”

Fred stares back quietly when Black Star looks at him, only to suddenly fluff up and imitate a cackling witch.

“Roger that.”

Turning away and leaving the room, Maka says, “I… would like to know why you don’t even have underwear to your name, but I closed the shop for lunch and I need to get back.”

“Thugnificent needs some playtime anyway,” he replies, following her down the stairs and into the kitchen. He is in a now-constant state of awareness, feeling Fred’s ominous presence at all times. The bird lurks a few paces behind, side-stepping his way down the hand railing.

After digging through the fridge, Maka supplies him with a cold slice of pizza like the tsundere saint she is. “You _are_ telling me what happened after work, right?” When she looks up at him directly to give a hard stare, she ends up laughing before Black Star can respond. 

“I know. I look amazing.” He strikes a coquettish pose while taking a bit of pizza, which makes her laugh harder while simultaneously paints her ears pink. “I’ll tell you anyfin’ you wanna know,” he adds, chewing.

Maka backs away to the shop door with her own slice, still sniggering. “Okay. You’d better.”

“I’m the **best** , excuse you,” he says, but the amused once-over she shoots him before disappearing into the shop makes his heart stumble a little, tiny, microscopic bit.

In the silence following Maka’s exit, Black Star hears the cockatoo imitate the long, drawn-out whistle of a plummeting bomb. “Kaboom,” says Fred.


	3. PRAISE LUCIFER YA DRONGO

Not that she’s surprised, but the generic, token-apology email from Parallax says nothing about addressing their rotten dog food issue, nor any kind of statement regarding whether they even give a damn about the animals they have endangered. She had expected as much, but the corporation’s apathy doesn’t make her any less infuriated.

Maka angrily purees the next batch of vegetables; she’s taken to making her own dog food now, because if you want something done right, do it yourself and stick it to the man at the same time. Her next plan of action is to go beyond the pet food branch of Parallax and compose angrier emails to send straight to the top of the corporation throne-- which coincidentally happens to be Black Star’s parents.

Black Star, himself, doesn’t appear to find her plan very sound. “I’m not gonna stop you,” he yells over the processor, wiping his hands on his apron she’d lent him; the scottish terriers are in the wash, and although she knows he’s wearing another bedlinen skirt, he looks naked under the apron, and it’s disrupting her ability to make rational thought. “But it’s not gonna change anything. That’s why I _left_!”

“Because they sell rotten puppy chow?” she yells back.

He ineffectively attempts to rub his itchy nose with his shoulder as he chops up the next batch of cauliflower. “I didn’t know about that one, but they’re like that with everything-- cuttin’ corners, bribery, blackmail-- you name it! Dad wanted me to take over,” he says, and she stops the processor so she can hear him. “I know every underhanded trick in the book.”

Black Star seems to feel Maka staring at him, and he looks over with an easy smile. “I wanna live my life my own way, so I, yanno, disowned them.”

Eyebrows furrowed, she replies, “I-I’m not sure the son can disown the parents. It goes the other way around.”

This does not deter him. He shrugs. “Well I did it pretty easily so maybe everyone else just needs more practice or somethin’.”

It’s a very Black-Star thing of him to say, and Maka had not realized how much she had missed that nonchalant, point-blank rejection of what the world considers rational. “I guess you’re right.” She smiles despite her foul mood, dumping the puree in a mixing bowl and waving in the next batch. “But why did you come here of all places? Or are you just... passing through?” She may reattach the lid to the food processor with excessive force at the thought.

Black Star pauses in the middle of chopping up more vegetables. In a tone that unexpectedly and thoroughly disarms her, he says, “Maks, this is the first place I came. You’re the only friend I ever had that wasn’t paid to stay.”

He seems to be saying something with his eyes, but she doesn’t understand it-- he’s been gone for over a decade, and she had no idea why he hadn’t even said goodbye, and she thought she really sort-of loved him, and, “If that’s true,” she says, blushing and confused and hurt all at once, “then why didn’t you even call? Or mail a friggen _postcard_ , do you know how worr--”

 **“What?”** He sets the knife down, forehead erupting in wrinkles. “But I _did_ write to you? You’re the one who never replied!”

She takes a step back with an inelegant, “ _Hah??_ I never got a single thing!” Voice climbing in pitch, she retorts, “ _You vanished and abandoned me!”_

“No way, I didn’t!”

“You did!”

“I didn’t!” he insists. “I got a postcard at every fuckin’ airport and I even bought the Godzilla stamps ‘cause you love Godzilla!!”

Maka’s mouth opens to argue, but she only ends up shouting, “You’re right! I do!” Her voice rings throughout the kitchen, and the ear-splitting silence after it is punctuated by both their heavy breathing and one tiny, distraught ‘ _mew_ ’ from the box next to the refrigerator.

The way Black Star transforms from Godzilla Stamp Enthusiast to mother hen in the span of a single, flustered heartbeat is a whiplash-inducing variety of endearing. He hurries over to the kitten, squatting down and cooing. And consequently loses the skirt.

He notices the draft the same time Maka gasps and chokes on her spit. Young twenty-something groomed-to-be-CEO heirs don’t normally have backsides like that, surely. Maka covers her face with her hands.

She hears, “If you were gonna look much longer, I was gonna start charging. I’m broke, yanno?”

Maka peeks between two fingers and sees how the back of Black Star’s neck is flushed. The satisfaction from this observation is, in itself, alarming, so she closes her fingers and rather impulsively shouts, “NAKED!”

She makes her getaway while Fred swoops in barking and howling.

\\\

He likes pizza as much as the next guy confined in the shadow of skeezy rich parents, and could even go so far as to say he would enjoy it several times a week if given the opportunity. But upon investigating Maka’s fridge, he thinks that maybe it is the _only_ food she eats, barring the literal rabbit food she pinches from the pet shop.

After finding a burnt bowl of instant oatmeal in the microwave, he determines the only things Maka Albarn can do in the kitchen is drink coffee and make (some very impressive looking) dog food. Even _he_ knows one can not become stronger than gods on pizza alone.

He can’t cook either, though, so they’re pretty fucked on that front.

 _“I can try to teach you, but you could google spaghetti and save me some time,”_ says Tsubaki over the phone, picking up his suit from the cleaners, and by picking up he means pinching from the cleaners. He’s broke, you know?

“That would be very excellent of you,” he says, flopping on the couch clad in a flannel bedsheet toga, which also happens to be as Christmas-themed as the decorative bathroom loincloths. “Also, I guess I need pants and whatever. She won’t let me work in the petshop in her nightie.”

He hears the _ding_ of a cash register being opened after hours. _“She’s a very wise person. Will that be all?”_

“Mom say anything?”

_“She is content to allow you to live your life in squalor until you ‘come crawling back’.”_

Business as usual, then. “Cool. And the other thing?”

Tsubaki takes a moment to reply, presumably slipping out of a basement window with the plastic-crinkling of his wrapped, dry-cleaned suit. _“Still looking for wheels, sir.”_

“Copy that. Lemme know if the situation changes. Later.”

“ _Sir_ ,” she replies, hanging up.

Black Star folds his arms behind his head. Well, at least that takes care of the underwear situation, but doesn’t really address pizzageddon in an immediate time frame. He tries to remember what the chefs at the various Parallax hotels had served him all the time, but for the past several months he had consumed food only for the fuel to find a way to escape, with no thought spared for taste.

...What does the middle class eat, anyway? Chicken nuggets?

Come to think of it, Maka’s mom used to cook when he came over as a kid. But more than the food, he mostly recalls roughhousing at the table and laughing a lot. Black Star tilts his head further back, the world flipping upside-down. Fred hangs nearby, his crest flexing. “Whaddya wanna eat, guy?” he asks the bird.

Fred whistles little memorized bits of TV commercial jingles before saying, “Fred wants a cookie?”

Cookies did sound pretty good. Better than pizza, anyway.

"Polly can **eat my ass,** ” the bird adds with a little head wobble.

\\\

The kitten is on his chest and prodigiously chewing on his chin when Black Star hears the faint sound of glass breaking.

Maka had gone up to bed over an hour ago, so he quietly rolls up off the couch, securing the Christmas sheet-skirt and toting Thugnificent back to her kitchen box to investigate; the noise had sounded like it came from inside the pet shop, and he ought to check to see if any critters had hurt themselves, or if Fred had staged a jailbreak and was on his way to world domination.

But then, from behind him, he hears Maka stage-whisper, “Did you hear something?” Creeping down the stairs, she’s still dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing all day-- presumably pulling another long night to satisfy her desire to write flaming hell emails to Parallax in lieu of going to sleep like he’d thought. “Glass?”

“Yeah,” he says with a nod. He reaches for the doorknob to the shop’s back entrance. “Your bodybirb probably summoned Satan or something.”

Maka huffs, hurrying across the kitchen. “He’s not an agent of darkne--” she starts to say, but then they both hear Fred crowing angrily, his “PERIMETER BREACH,” cut off with an alarming squawk. The noise in the shop quadruples, all the animals inside howling and chattering.

Black Star watches the color drain from Maka’s complexion, but she’s quick to recover and beelines to the pantry closet, pulling out a big-leaguer baseball bat. She hefts this in a hand and rolls a shoulder, pure murder in her face as she strides back over to the door. “Woah wait, lemme go first,” he says, blocking her way with an arm.

“You’re not wearing _pants,_ ” she hisses-- as if that’s relevant-- and hip checks him aside. She disappears into the shadows of the pet shop, the din of excited animals easily masking her footsteps. Her bullheadedness is one of the reasons why he’s always liked her, but the whole jumping in head-first into something hazardous is more of his schtick.

He hurries in, except he’s already lost sight of her. He can hear Fred’s muffled barking, though, and he cuts around the long way to maybe catch whatever has set the whole shop off unaware. And if it’s a _burglar_ , well… no one can out-scumbag a Parallax heir-- he knows every underhanded trick in the book, after all.

\\\

She has no time for middle-of-the-night chivalry.

As she rushes to the array of switches for the overhead lights, she hears a grunt from the back corner where Fred’s habitat is, a familiar voice growling, “ _Shut yer fuckin’ mouth you noisy shit.”_

Anger makes her shake. As soon as she remembers who that voice belongs to, she’s going to beat his face in, because even if she finds the bird a bit burdensome most of the time, Fred is her heroic, vulgar protector, and if some unskilled burglar harms him, someone’s ass will be kicked to the moon and back in short order.

“You are only _just_ worth the effort, Pinky.”

Maka hits the overhead lights and discovers her former employee, Giriko, squinting with a hand to shield his eyes. A metal brace spans the bridge of his nose-- a result of their previous encounter.

 **“Hey. Shitbag,”** she yells, gritting her teeth because she has only just now considered using her phone to take video evidence of this bozo stealing _her_ security bird, but it was still upstairs in her bedroom. She lifts the bat for emphasis. “You won’t have a nose left to fix next time if you don’t release the cockatoo right now.”

Giriko is rolling his eyes before he even looks at her. “Hey birdbitch.” He lifts a struggling pillowcase to her in greeting. “I’m only here because this loudmouth is worth four grand and I have a nosejob to pay for.”

“That’s a record low.” Maka replies, her fingers clenching around the bat. “Pretty pathetic having to steal from a pet shop, don’t you think?”

“Pathetic? Don’t you mean _you_?” He laughs, and it’s the kind of sound one does not want to hear in a dark alley because the one laughing is a scumbucket who has no qualms feeding rotten food to puppies, and being in close quarters with someone like that is just physically gross. “The dogs hate you ‘cause you’re a violent bitch, and the birds only put up with you ‘cause your old man trained them to! What’re you _doing_ here, sweetheart?”

Maka grits her teeth and holds her ground, but something in her countenance must visibly falter, because Giriko takes one look at her and doesn’t look threatened at all. In fact, he finds her entertaining.

“Oh, that’s right. _Nothing,”_ he answers for her, knotting the pillowcase and ignoring Fred’s angry cries. “‘Cause your only friend is this flying shit-machine and I could crush his head with my fist if you don’t drop the bat, babe.”

Despite her gut-twisting fury, she laughs. “Shouldn’t have said that.”

Because ‘babe’ is one of the 277 alarm triggers for Fred the cockatoo.

**“CODE RED WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP PRAISE LUCIFER YA DRONGO--”**

This sets off a fresh round of puppy howling throughout the store. “Are you fucking serious right now?” Giriko says, scowling at the twisting pillowcase in his hands. Fred can not be contained by cheap, 200-threadcount bedding, and he starts tearing away at the fabric from the inside.

The distraction opens a window of opportunity to tackle this asshole. Maka takes a step forward, but then leaps back in surprise, getting out of the way of the Christmas-printed blur sprinting at Giriko.

“Assflash, newshole!!” shouts Black Star, and Maka witnesses an heir in bedsheet armor flying rather horizontally from between the stacks of stockpiled cat litter, delivering a flying drop kick to the would-be bird burglar. Assflash included.

Fred escapes during the collision, swooping away from the pile-up on the floor and landing on Maka’s head. The bat in her hand lowers to the ground, which Maka uses as a sort-of walking stick to prop herself up with to watch the proceedings. She anticipates a lot of wrestling and possibly maniacal laughter on Black Star’s part, but what she doesn’t expect is:

“There’s nothing pathetic here ‘cept **you.** Maks is a goddess; you’re just a disappointment.”

 _Thump_ , goes her ribcage.

“You’re all _fucking losers,_ get the hell off me! Why are you _naked?!”_

“Shouldn’t’ve said that, dude.”

“WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF!”

 

\\\

 

When a guy who has been proclaiming himself a god since the second grade calls one a goddess, it alters one’s mindset.

This, on top of the Godzilla stamps.

 _“Sup,”_ says Soul, shoving a cinnamon bun into his face.

“Hey, um. How’s it… going?” She’s aiming for casual, which only goes in the exact opposite direction. Soul looks back to his front-facing camera, pulling the bun away to peer critically at her face-time video.

_“Don’t gross me out, we don’t do small talk ever. Who died? If you mention the weather, I’ll assume there's a body.”_

“I haven’t murdered anyone!” Maka melts into her desk chair, hiding half her face with a hand. “I just didn’t wanna bug you about stuff without, like, seeing how you were doing--”

Soul grimaces, leaning away from the screen. _“Barf barf barf BARF barf bar--”_

Growling, she brings the phone close to her mouth and urgently whispers, _“Howdoyouasksomeoneoutonadate?”_ When she inches the screen back, she can see the whites of his eyes, his shock traveling at light speed across the country and into her sweaty hand.

The shock fades into amusement he is not very deft at containing. _“I mean, I love you and everything, but you **do** know I’m taken, right?”_

Maka slaps her hand on his flatscreen face. “Uhg shut uuuuuuuuuuuup,” she whines over his laughter.

 _“WHO IS IT?”_ He loudly rips another chunk out of the cinnamon bun with his teeth. “ _I fheel kina proub!”_

Putting on her best poker face-- which is to say she’s never played poker before and is actually pretty bad at Old Maid, as well-- she removes her hand and says, “He’s, um. A distinguished guy from Big Money?”

Soul chews, shaking his head. _“Watching you try to beat around the bush ish physically painful.”_

“It’s because you’re gonna laugh!”

_“Well, yeah. But okay, fine, I promish I will tell you how to ash your risch guy out.”_

“Without laughing.”

He cracks up. _“I’m not Jesush, Maka.”_

 _“What’s the matter?”_ asks Kilik from the background, and now the two of them are smushed together on a couch inside Maka’s phone. Soul says something unintelligible with his mouth full, and Kilik nods, addressing the phone to say, _“He’s not laughing at your feelings, but is just suffering from your embarrassment second-handedly.”_

She says, “That isn’t very helpful,” ears burning.

 _“Sorry,”_ Soul says, finally swallowing his food and trying his best to sober up. _“It’s just-- the last time you crushed on anyone was when that annoying kid who cawed like a parrot in that one tree moved away. And now you’re calling **me--”**_

“You’re the only person I know who’s asked a dude out and succeeded, _shut up._ ” Maka thunks her head on her desk, defeated. Kilik just bursts out laughing. “Anyway, it _is_ the annoying parrot kid. Except now he’s like six-one, dyes his hair blue, and saved Fred from a bird-napper.”

 _“Another one, huh?”_ asks Kilik.

Turning her head to the side to see the phone, she mumbles, “Yeah. He tackled the guy. It was actually… kinda cool.”

Soul whistles. _”Okay so listen, before I throw up or die laughing: all you gotta do is ask him out.”_

“Thanks, you’re a real genius.”

_“I’m serious!”_

“What am I supposed to do? Just walk up and say, “Hey, wanna go on a date?””

 _“Yes,”_ the men say in unison.

Maka groans, resisting the urge to hang up on them. “I don’t want to weird him out.” And he disappears again, with his pretty, weekday-only bodyguard. “What if he says no?”

 _“Then I’ll drop a piano on him,”_ Soul says, as serious as a funeral.

“Damn it, Soul--”

_“Do you wanna ask him out or not?”_

Her mouth opens and she accidentally squawks like Fred. “I-I _do_ , but like, if it doesn’t go well… He said I was pretty much his only friend, and _I don’t know!”_

While Soul’s face screws up with exasperation, Kilik tilts his head and asks, _“That’s not your responsibility, though? His amount of friends.”_

When her mouth opens, nothing comes out this time.

 _“If you’re not ready to ask someone out, then you’re not. It’s cool,"_ says Soul. _"But if you’re afraid telling someone how **you** feel will inconvenience **them,** I’m gonna get real fuckin’ mad at you, man.”_

Maka sits up straight, feeling attacked because she’s just trying to do what’s best for everyone! “What?!” she says too loud, then remembers Black Star is downstairs on the couch. She quietly hisses, “Why?”

_“Because! You’re straightforward about everything except your own happiness, and it pisses me off!”_

“ **You** piss me off! I don’t understand what you’re even saying!”

_“Like with the shop-- you don’t wanna disappoint your dad, so he has no idea what you really feel, right?”_

Maka bolts out of her chair, blurting, “That has nothing to do with this--” but even as she says it, she knows it has at least something to do with probably everything, and Soul had to spell it out for her.

Speller in question just rolls his eyes and looks away from the phone, and Kilik, who has had to play visual ping-pong between the two of them while literally supporting the conversation in his hand, turns the camera away for a moment.

_“You cool?”_

_“She wouldn’t call me for advice if she didn’t want facts.”_ There’s a loud rustle, and the phone is back in Soul’s hand. _“Right?”_ he asks her, needing more confirmation than he lets on.

Maka finds her voice, though it’s small. “Yeah. No small talk.” She sits back down, fluctuating in an awkward mental place between contrite and utterly upended. She sighs. “...The stuff about the shop aside, I’m afraid Black Star will leave,” she admits. “What we have right now is good.”

 _“Everyone has that fear, even when you get what you want,”_ says Kilik, leaning into view. _“You just want to make everyone happy, and that’s not a fault, really.”_

Scowling, Soul says, _“Yeah, okay. But listen,”_ and he looks directly into the camera, which is as close to direct eye contact anyone can get out of Soul Evans. _“If you don’t ever speak up, you’ll be miserable. I know that the best. Making yourself unhappy doesn’t make **anyone** happy.”_

He leans back into the couch, putting on the cool facade like a security blanket because he’s said more serious stuff in the past three minutes than he typically does in a year. “ _This guy probably isn’t gonna say no anyway, considering the last time he saw you, you were like nine, and he still came back. You were an asshole at nine.”_

She splutters. “You didn’t even know me yet!”

_“Your dad showed me family videos, and you were just as loud as Black Star in that tree. What the fuck were you guys doing, anyway? Calling the parrot gods?”_

“Uhhhhg.” Maka slumps in her chair, looking out the window. “We were trying to get the moon to crash into the Earth.”

 _“ **Wow,**_ ” says Kilik.

 _“Assholes,”_ Soul says, laughing.


	4. SCREW YOU

It’s a Christmas-towel Miracle. The dog food she and Black Star had made was palatable enough that the pups in the shop not only willingly came to her for food, but even let her pet them a little while chowing down. She ends up sitting near the puppy pen during the majority of the workday, and presently has a chihuahua in her lap, chewing on her apron strings as she watches two workers lift a new pane of glass for the shattered front window.

“I can finally do something for them that they _like_ ,” she tells Black Star, who is sweeping the floor down an aisle. His bodyguard had dropped off some clothes that had been mysteriously acquired by means the woman explicitly did not explain, and seeing Black Star fully clothed in something that suited him is somehow more flustering than seeing his ass when drop-kicking burglars.

He looks over his shoulder; she hears Soul in the back of her head, bitching about taking risks. “Not just them-- another person came in askin’ about the food you sent them home with. The one who adopted that corgi.”

That’s the fifth customer, and it’s only been two days. “I wonder if I can make enough so we don’t have to stock _anything_ from Parallax?” she asks aloud, as if she’s only thought of it just now and not a good twelve hours ago, when writing her nth angry email fueled by determination and pizza crust. 

Black Star finds this the funniest thing he’s ever heard in his life. He salutes. “I am on fuckin’ board, dude. I’ll chop veggies with my hands AND feet if it screws over my folks.”

“Screw you,” says Fred.

“Yeah, yeah,” Black Star replies, returning to sweeping. He’s not very far from where he’d saved the bird and defended Maka’s honor, sitting on Giriko until the police had arrived. “I thought you liked me after I VERY HEROICALLY rescued your feathery pink butt.” He tries to rile up the other birds to take his side, but they just keep telling him to back off, fucko. Maka does not stifle her laugh.

After Soul’s pep-talk (in the form of a stern lecture), she’s tempted to take the risk-- not just asking Black Star out, but also relying on him to help with these grand sticking-it-to-the-man schemes. But is that sensible? Falling stars shine bright and brief, which is why all you can do is wish and watch it disappear; if Black Star vanished for another twelve years, right now, would she be surprised?

She sighs. She can talk herself out of anything. “It’s a bad idea,” she says aloud, enjoying the novelty of the chihuahua’s soft little ears. “That’s a lot of extra work on top of running the shop.” 

“But I’m here, now,” Black Star insists, as if hearing her thoughts. “I can help!”

 _“You_ need to find a place to stay,” she says, wincing when the puppy nips at her finger. “Papa comes back in a few days.”

He leans the broom against a stack of cat litter containers. “I… yeah, but that and this are different things, right? I work for you whether I’m couch surfin’ or not.”

“But, I mean--” Maka scrunches up her face, confused. “You can’t just keep working here.”

“Why not?”

She blinks. “Didn’t you say you wanted to live your own way?” Surely working at a _petshop_ isn’t his career of choice.

But without fluffing up, grinning wide, or boasting loud and proud, he says, “I am.” He locks eyes with her for a moment, and he feels present-- less like a temporary flash in the sky. He crosses his arms. “You can rely on your god more than this,” he says, point-blank.

“O-oh,” she says stupidly. She wishes she knew what he’d written on all the Godzilla-stamped cards she never got to read. 

“Plus I’m in love with every dog here,” he says, looking towards the petting pen, where the puppies are all climbing on top of each other. “Especially Marsha, Sandra, Cheryl, and Bob.”

“You’ve _named them?_ ” Why does the kitten get something like ‘Thugnificent’ but the dogs sound like they belong in a homeowner’s association? 

Despite her doubts, happiness twirls under her skin. Maka slowly leans to one side, cradling the chihuahua with one hand while pulling a folded paper from her back pocket. “If you _really_ want… I already did some math?” she offers, flapping the paper in the air for him to take.

“Now that’s more like the nerd I know,” he says, voice the very opposite of unkind.

Her face-melting blush aside, she’d already determined creating enough homemade pet food to phase out all the goods from Parallax in the shop would take, “Like, a fuckload of everything. Celsius,” Black Star says, looking at the grocery list. 

“I mean, we’d save a lot of money in the long run. Until then, it’s kind of an investment. Also, I’m not sure I have enough _time._ ”

Black Star bats her head with the paper. “I. Told. You. I can do things.”

She stumbles over her tongue. “R-right.” And then she loses control over her mouth entirely, because the blue dye is growing on her, and some childish part in the pit of her heart selfishly hopes if she keeps him to herself, he won’t go away. “Hey, you wanna go out after this?”

It takes all her willpower to not retreat to the nearest office supply store and duct-tape her entire face shut. Black Star stares at her for three silent seconds too long, and in those three seconds, the puppy in her lap decides it has had enough of her incompetence, and bullets from her hands to freedom. 

“Cindy!”

Maka swears -- even though she’s grateful for the interruption of the Biggest Mistake In Her Life, Probably, seeing as they’ve been reunited for five days and, again, requires duct tape-- and scrambles up from the floor to run after the puppy because it’s headed straight for the open window that the repairmen are still replacing. Luckily, one of the men looks up at the commotion and wildly waves an arm to shoo the chihuahua away and scare it back into the shop. 

Still, the pup is determined to avoid Maka at any cost (and really if it were her, she would be too), and it slips past her, running down an aisle.

Black Star joins the chase, but he’s also set on continuing the conversation, much to her dismay. “Like, after we close?” he asks, then cuts down a different aisle while shouting, “ _Pincer attack!!”_

They try to trap the puppy, Maka at one end of the aisle and Black Star at the other. Both try to calmly creep forward, hunched over to grab the dog in case it bolts, and Maka nervously says, “I thought we, u-um, could maybe grab some foOD?!” she lunges mid-sentence to catch the Cindy, but Black Star does the same, and they smack into each other as the chihuahua escapes.

“Grab what?” he asks with a wince, steadying her by the shoulders. 

Too close. “ **Food** ,” she says with a hideous squeak in her throat. “Grab a food. A grocery food!” She turns and slips out of his hold, skin on fire, and runs away more than chasing after the puppy. “For the dog food thing?”

Please. Tape. Maybe hundred-mile-an-hour tape.

“Oh,” he says behind her, following her to the end of the aisle. Her heart is too loud in her ears to hear if there had been any kind of disappointment in his voice. “Right on, I wanna wrestle veteran housewives for discounted eggs! They go _hard.”_

Before Maka can even begin to process that or what kind of middle-class fantasies he thinks happen at Kroger, they both stop short while turning the corner because Tsubaki is on the other side in her crisp pantsuit. The chihuahua is in one hand while a newspaper ad is in the other. 

“Please excuse my eavesdropping, sir,” she says, holding out the ad, “but there is a big sale on sweet potatoes if it interests you.”

Black Star does a little fistpump. “You continue to be the most excellent of humans.” Turning to Maka with a big grin, he adds, “We need a fuckload of those too, don’t we?”

“That’s perfect,” she says, pasting on an even larger smile. She resists taking the paper to fan the embarrassment off her face. “Let’s all go together!”

Soul would not be very pleased with her cowardice, she thinks.

\\\

Mental note: check housewife-wrestling, membership discount cards, and riding a grocery cart full of chicken organs at high speed down the breakfast cereal aisle off the bucket list.

Also, another note: he needs to find out who the heck this Kid guy is, because Maka is leagues more smile-y and comfortable around this token businessman than himself. To make things worse, Kid doesn’t respond to any form of male posturing whatsoever, and it’s cramping Black Star’s need to be the biggest star in the room. Or parking-lot, in this case.

They’ve run into him as he was packing his purchases in the trunk of his car, and Maka has conscripted him into a big dog food cooking party. Kid looks three-hundred percent disgusted by the very idea, even admitting, “I would rather jump off a building,” but he _agrees anyway?_ And now they’re piling into his car because he’s offered the three of them a ride home.

Black Star does not sigh in the back seat, but he’d really, _really_ like to. He knows he’s put off by Maka inviting all (actually two) humans on the planet to make dog food immediately after asking him to ‘go out’, which at the time he had thought could possibly, maybe have been her tsundere way of saying ‘I think you are really strong and didn’t make a mistake leaving your family and wealth behind and you have a godlike butt, please date me’. 

Which isn’t what she’d meant at all, of course, but if he doesn’t get his hopes up for _something_ , he’d be hopeless entirely, and that’s not how he rolls. Black Star forces the denied sigh to become something constructive, and says, “You should make your own line of pet food. And advertise! You can use my face for the label, I don’t mind.”

“That may draw unwanted attention to you, sir. The kitten would be better.”

“I also think the kitten would be better,” chimes in Kid, though _no one asked him._

Exasperated, Maka says, “I can’t put a cat as a mascot for DOG food, you guys. And it’s way too soon to be advertising. Just because a couple of customers asked about it doesn’t mean--”

Kid talks right over her, which is a dick move, but he does it with, “I can run copies of advertisements at the office,” which makes Black Star (grudgingly) forgive him of his sins. “Your angry emails haven’t deterred Parallax-- maybe taking some of their sales will.”

Black Star doesn’t have to be in the front seat to know those were the precise words to light the fire of Maka’s resolve, which makes her eyes do this really bright, intimidating thing that he likes a lot. He’s glad, but also irked he hadn’t been the one to ignite her.

Clearly he needs to get stronger, yet. With more than just his muscles. “Make Fred the mascot. He can learn a new jingle and make a TV commercial. He’d go viral.”

“How have we moved to TV already?” Maka says with a scoff, but she doesn’t outright reject the idea, and when he beams at her through the passenger window and into the car’s side mirror, she sees him and laughs back.

They pull up in front of the Albarns’ house, and as soon as Kid parks, Tsubaki rockets out of the car, murmuring a ‘please excuse me’ before speedwalking across the street.

Black Star climbs out of the car to see his bodyguard talk to a short, blonde woman at The Tree in the park. She looks kind of familiar. 

Openly suspicious, Kid says, “I wonder what that’s about.” 

Black Star smoothly replies, “None of your business, businessman,” even though he still hasn’t placed that woman’s face, and shuts the car door. 

Using some underhanded powers of suggestion, he walks to the house with two armfuls of grocery bags, fully expecting them to follow his lead. “Anyway, I know someone who can design you an ad, Maks. She’s real good!”

Maka (and, eventually, Kid) trails after him, Tsubaki’s unusual behavior ignored. “Really?” she asks, a glimmer of excitement in her eyes.

“Yeah!” Though… actually, he’s not sure that’s true, seeing as she works for Parallax and he’d abandoned ship without even saying goodbye. “Maybe?”

\\\

Only three hours later, Kid and Tsubaki are eating spaghetti, in cahoots about something in the living room-- which gives him a hardcore case of heebie jeebies-- and Maka says, “She’s already replied!”

Mira Naigus has emailed a snazzy, hipster-looking ad, rendering Maka into a continual state of ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’. Black Star hadn’t expected such quick results. He frowns at the chicken boiling on the stove-- he’s shocked she even acknowledged him.

“‘Call Sid if you need help distributing the ads,’ winky face,” Maka reads aloud. She looks up from the laptop she’d set up on the kitchen table. “Who’s Sid?”

Black Star puts the lid back on the stock pot, running a hand through his hair as he walks over to the table. “Ummm, you know how Stein is your weird not-uncle?” he asks, sitting down. “Sid’s kinda like that, I guess. Also he’s HR for my dad.”

Maka’s eyes widen, her lips pulling into a line. “HR as in, all my angry emails are going to your not-uncle?”

“Oh! Yeah, probably. Don’t take his replies personally, he’s forced to deflect all complaints so Parallax takes none of the heat.” The thought of the company leaves a shitty taste in his mouth, as always. “It’s his job, but that’s not the kinda guy he _is_ , you know?”

The conflicted noise she makes in the back of her throat is pretty much how he feels about it, too-- he hadn’t expected Sid to do anything for him, either.

Eventually, Maka says, “That’s very kind of them, helping with this… especially with all the beef I have with the company.” She clicks the trackpad button a few times. “This is a really slick ad. Also, stop doing that-- your hair is ridiculous enough.”

Black Star then realizes he’d still been scrubbing his hair while his brain had been going in circles over Sid and Mira acknowledging his existence. “Oh.” He puts his hand in his lap, unsure what to do with himself. 

Maka snorts. “Now it looks even more like--”

“Hey sweet thang,” says a disturbingly Spirit-Albarn-like voice. “What’s your sign, cutie?”

He watches Maka cover her mouth in horror, and then something collides into his head. The next two minutes are something he can cross off his bucket list which never, ever should have been to begin with.

“I think he likes you now, Sir,” calls Tsubaki from the living room.

“Like-likes,” adds Kid, solemn.

“NO ONE ASKED YOU.”

\\\

She had assumed Black Star’s plan to move out into his own place was along the lines of ‘fit under the kitchen sink’ at best, but when Mira and Sid leave with a fresh box of staples and another stack of Kid’s flyers, Tsubaki shows up with a bag of money and plops it rather ceremoniously on the pet shop’s check-out counter. 

“I have acquired enough funding for the down-payment of a one-room apartment, sir.”

“Stellar,” he says (high praise, from him), as if he’d been expecting a bag of loose change and wadded twenties to appear. He checks on the dwarf hamster curled up in the top pocket of his apron. Then to Maka, he says, “Should tide me over until my first paycheck from you,” beaming like the sun.

“Please tell me this was legal,” Maka says, but Tsubaki has already gone through the door connecting the shop to the house, eager to see Thugnificent. 

Black Star replies, “Oh yeah sure, none of it is counterfeit.”

“Th-that’s not what I--”

The store’s phone rings, and any semblance of calm Maka thought she had is frazzled to its last threads; the phone’s been off the hook with past customers asking about the dog food with Fred’s face on it, heard through word-of-mouth or the posters Sid and Mira have been stapling to every surface the past two days. She takes a steadying breath. “Albarn Barnyard, how can I help you?” Maka asks, hurriedly sliding the _bag of money_ off the counter and toting it into the house to keep it out of sight. 

_“Maka,”_ says Kid, maybe one half-step higher in pitch than the usual; he is _very_ excited. “ _Turn on D-city news immediately.”_

“Uuuhhh,” she replies, burdened by the moneybag and side-stepping around Tsubaki permanently attached to the kitten’s box on the floor. “What happened? Disaster? Did Papa get arrested?”

_“No, this may be the opposite of disaster.”_

Maka traps the phone between her shoulder and cheek, digging in the couch for the remote control. “Oookay?” 

When she turns on the television and flips over to the news station, she’s met with a live broadcast of a man with very conspicuous muscles wearing a very conspicuous suit on a street corner four blocks away. Sid Barett nods at whatever the reporter has just said. He leans towards the microphone and replies, “Unlike certain big-brand companies, Fredzilla’s Grubless Grub is made fresh and carefully stored to avoid bug infestation. Miss Albarn is… _passionate_ on her stance for providing pets safe and nutritious food.”

Her mouth falls open. “What. Is happening?” asks Maka in shock.

The phone still pressed against her face, she distantly hears Kid say, _“It appears to be the head of HR for Parallax promoting someone other than Parallax. This’ll certainly take some sales from the company.”_

On the television, the reporter asks, “And would you recommend Fredzilla to other pet owners?”

“I would,” Sid easily replies. He then looks directly into the camera, saying, “And if all you’re eating is pizza and cookie dough, I’ll recommend it to _you_ too.”

The two go off on a tangent about how the pet food is safe for humans to eat, and Maka asks Kid, “Why would he do that? I didn’t know he cared about any of this… _I sent him so many nasty emails!!”_

Despite her confusion, Kid huffs on the phone, clearly not deeming the answer to that question worth saying aloud. _“I’ll go make more flyers,”_ he says, and hangs up.

Maka lets the phone slide from her shoulder to rest on the money bag in her arms. The camera pans over to the reporter, the short blonde woman addressing the audience directly. “There ya have it, the hottest pet food in town, made fresh from local pet shop Albarn Barnyard!”

“W-w-waIT??” she blurts, taking a step away from the television and whipping her head to find Tsubaki-- who has apparently appeared next to her, cuddling the kitten again. “Isn’t she the one you were talking to the other night?”

The bag of cash in her hand feels subtly heavier; Tsubaki replies with a winning smile before bringing Thugnificent up to her face and rubbing her nose into its plush fur.

“It hasn’t even been a week…” Maka says helplessly.

Black Star opens the back door of the shop and pokes his head around. “Hey Maks! There’s some newspaper here wanting to take a selfie with Fred!”

\\\

Her experience with alcohol can be summarized by last New Year’s Eve, hanging out with Soul and Kilik while they were in town. The champagne had tasted dusty, like stale cheerios soaked in almost-fruit-flavored hairspray, and she was relieved all three of them had felt it was liquid garbage and went to the frozen custard place, instead.

Needless to say, the drink menu in her hands is a colorful avalanche of weird names that don’t sound the least bit edible.

But Black Star had insisted they go out (not go _out,_ but _go_ out, she reminds herself, before she has a heart-attack) and celebrate, and he’d asked Tsubaki who’d asked Google where a good bar and grill was, so now Maka is being carded because she suffers from eternal preteen face.

Dusty cheerios notwithstanding, she **does** want to celebrate. Even if she’s bewildered how she’d gone from pureeing turnips out of sheer fury to taking three dozen petfood orders from customers in the span of five days. And the publicity from the news station had doubled the amount of adoptions-- a lot of animals went to good families today. So she has ordered a Long Island Iced Tea, because tea is the only thing on the menu she’s certain is a beverage.

Over an overindulgent spread of every appetizer on the menu, Black Star makes a toast to good fortune and discounted sweet potatoes with his drink held in both hands, because he’d ordered a ‘Gator Punch’ (which had sounded the coolest and came in a small fishbowl).

“And to Fred,” Maka adds with a laugh, raising her glass. Her drink doesn’t taste anything like tea, but it’s not hairspray cheerios either, so it’s not bad. “Your friends have helped me so much. Sid was on TV!”

Black Star pops an entire fried mozzarella stick in his mouth. “I know! I’ll be shurprize if he’s not fired by morning.”

She almost spills her drink. “ **What?** If he loses his job over my dog food--”

Dismissively waving a hand, he swallows is food and says, “He wouldn’t’ve done it if he didn’t want to.” He smiles wide and warm, and she hasn’t seen him look so genuinely pleased since she’d offered him a work and place to stay. “He’s an adaptable guy, don’t worry. I think you gave him the courage to stand up to my dad.”

“If you say so…” She doesn’t see how angry emails could give anyone courage-- especially the last three or four she’d sent. She’d been aiming for Striking Fear In The Hearts Of Scumbag-Men. “Anyway, isn’t that you? You’re the one who ‘disowned’ Parallax first! Maybe you’re a trendsetter.”

She would say Black Star appeared bashful if she thought he knew the meaning of the word. “Eheheh~ That **is** true,” he says, eyes sparkling with pride. She scoffs.

“At the risk of further inflating your ego,” she says before taking another draw from the straw in her drink, “If you hadn’t have shown up, I don’t think any of this would’ve been possible.”

“...I mean, I _did_ help, but I don’t think any of this stuff you couldn’t have pulled off on your own. You’re real smart, and you work hard-- I just helped it go faster.”

Maka frowns. “ _And_ encouraged me. And you saved Fred, and Tsubaki helped with … I’m not even sure what, sometimes, but I know she _did_ , and Mira and Sid too! And Kid keeps helping too--” 

“I don’t have anything to do with that guy, though,” he says, his mouth twisting in a way she’s never seen before. He appears to cover it up with a mounded heap of fajita nachos. 

Well, whatever. She takes another sip of her drink. “But I think he respects you a lot for, like, doing something different than your father? He won’t admit it, but he likes coming over for our cooking parties.”

“We’ve only had one cooking party.”

 _“So?”_ she challenges. “Shut up! Also... thank you. I’m having a lot of fun and I’m really glad you chose to come here, wow what the hell I am talking _nonstop--_ ”

Black Star snickers behind a hand. “No stress, Maks,” he replies, scooting a plate over to her. “But you should prolly eat some of these baller cheesy fries.”

“You’re _right!”_ God, they are so baller.

“I’m glad I came, too,” he says, almost too quiet for her to hear over the loud crowd of the bar and grill. He scratches the back of his neck. “When you never replied to my letters, I was… a-fraid?” He doesn’t seem to know the meaning of that word, either. “I thought you hated me. Or you moved away. And I thought for _sure_ you’d be like a doctor or a monster truck driver by now.”

She _would_ be a good monster truck driver, wouldn’t she? But the high of that fantasy dies out quickly, and she lapses into silence, sipping at her tea. Eventually, she says, “No, I… hm. The shop was Mama’s, and when I was little-er, I wanted to be like her and run it and all that. I don’t really know anymore. It’s what Papa wants, and I don’t want the shop the _close_ , so here I am.” Maka sinks low in her booth.

She feels like she could do so much more for the animals. Like this petfood thing! She’s excited for it in a way she hasn’t been since before college, and she already has plans to stay up all night and find cool things like nutritional data for birds and cats and fish and--

“Is Spirit forcing you to work the shop?” Black Star asks, concern making him lean closer. “You’re allowed to say no, yanno?”

“I… haven’t. Told him. This.” She tries her hand at fajita nacho-deflection. “He doesn’t know. He’s so busy with his work and I don’t wanna make him sad.”

Black Star holds both his hands in the air, completely confused. “Maks, your dad is fucking weird, but he’s not like _my_ dad. You don’t have to disown him and forfeit all your socks in order to tell him you don’t wanna do a thing. He actually _cares_ about you.”

Maka shrinks further into the booth. “But he’s so happy the way things are now…”

“Who are you and what did you do with Maka Albarn?” he asks, bewildered. “Wouldn’t he be upset if he found out you’re _not_ happy? Hell, I’m upset about it and I only just now found out!”

Something about this reminds her of something else, but she can’t follow that trail of thought long enough to make it to the end-- she’s also _really tired_ all of a sudden, and just thinking about disappointing her father makes her want to curl up in bed, because, “Wouldn’t that make me a bad daughter for not taking over the family business?”

Across the table, Black Star makes a noise approaching a laugh, but it’s not lighthearted enough to get there. “If it does, then I’m a _real shitty_ daughter.”

“What?” Maka blurts, sitting up again. “No you’re not, you’re Black Star! You’re the _best_ daughter-- wait.” She brings both hands to her hot cheeks while he folds over on himself with laughter-- the real kind. “Oh god, is this being drunk? This is drunk, I’m sorry. _Woah._ ”

\\\

He uses the last of his Rolex-For-Tacos fund for the taxi ride home, though there’s still the matter of getting her from the cab to the house and up the stairs. The upside is that she’s tiny; the downside is she’s made of muscle and apparently being drunk makes her weigh about as much as Sid. 

“How ya doin’ back there?” he asks as he tries to keep her on his back while unlocking the front door. 

Maka has taken to pressing her face into the back of his neck, and if he were a weaker man his legs would probably give out every time she says something. “Your parents’re stoopid and Imma set them _on fire,_ ” she slurs in his hair, her arms dangling off his shoulders like limp noodles.

“You always know just what to say.” Sure his stomach is a little warm from the Gator Punch, but she is beyond sloshed. He hobbles his way through the door, and they are greeted by The Witch Cackle. “We come in peace!” Black Star calls out, hoping his hair is the least cockatoo-like as possible.

“Freeeedddd,” Maka mutters into his neck, and gods flex their glutes self-consciously. “Bedtime, pretty bird.”

The Witch Cackle devolves into an approximation of human snoring, but performed at Mach V, which sounds a bit like a squirrel hyperventilating. Fred is in the kitchen, keeping one soulless Eye of Sauron on the kitten in the box, but after he sees Maka, he stalks across the countertops to follow after her. Black Star is surprised he hasn’t set off some kind of proximity alarm, but he doesn’t want to push his luck by bringing it up.

“Why’s yer stuff in grocery bags?” she asks as he hauls her past the couch. His clothes Tsubaki had brought him are rolled up and packed away, his dry-cleaned suit still wrapped in plastic and draped over an armrest. “‘Cause I’m moving out, remember?” He hikes her up a little higher on his back in preparation for the staircase of doom-- a worthy adversary. “Your dad comes back tomorrow.”

“Oh. Yeah,” she says, her arms retreating until her hands clutch at his shoulders like some kind of sloth. She seems to curl in on herself, hiding her face against the back of his shirt. 

“Maks?”

“Don’t drop me.”

“Don’t insult your god in such a way,” he replies. The bird climbs the stairs ahead of him, still snoozing at turbo speed.

Once in her room, she detaches from his back, landing on her bed still curled up like a cramped barnacle. “I should brush my teeth,” she says to the ceiling. She doesn’t move for a good thirty seconds, though.

“...Well _I’m_ not doing it for you,” he says.

“Uhg.” She finally unfurls, making herself comfortable and smashing her head into the pillows. “Worth a shot.”

Black Star scoffs. “If I knew you were a bratty drunk, I woulda told you not to get a Long Island.” That being said, she _is_ pretty entertaining. Maka rarely ever settled for other people doing things she could do herself, and seeing her want to be spoiled is new. He’d like to think she’s only acting like this because she’s comfortable around him.

He’s hunting around for something she could potentially puke in later, spying a small trash bin by her desk. As he reaches for it, he hears her mutter, “Sorry, Star.”

He picks up the can, bringing it over to her bedside. She looks really small with all the pillows, so he kneels on the floor to stay at eye level with her. “Nothin’ to be sorry about. We had a good time, didn’t we?”

Maka shakes her head. _“Sorry,”_ she says again, insistent. “Coz I never wrote back. And you thought I hated you. I promise I never saw the Godzillas.”

“Oh.” She looks so legitimately forlorn he can’t even laugh at her drastic subject change. He folds his arms on the edge of her bed and rests his head on them. “I’m sorry too. I didn’t want to leave. It was a big misunderstanding though, and it’s done, so we’re all good now, got it?”

Petulantly, she says, “Fistbump me.”

He does.

“Okay,” Maka says, now that they’ve sealed the deal. Though she still looks a little pitiful.

“Alright listen up, you lush,” says Black Star, leaning back and nodding to the trashcan on the floor. “Barf bucket.”

She gives it a good, long, slow-blink. “Gross.”

From his perch near the wall, Fred says, “Eeeww.”

“Yeah, so aim.” He leans back on the bed again, but more carefully than before, now that he’s remembered there’s a chastity bird in the room. “Anything you need, Shortbarn? Water?”

Maka plops her hand on his head, combing through his hair with her fingers. His entire body freezes, unsure what is happening. “S’there anything _you_ need? ...Socks?”

“N-no, I’m good. I got everything I need.”

Maka doesn't sound convinced. “You need more, though.” Her hand feels really nice. “You deserve the moon, you know? I’ll caw it down. And _slam it into Parallax--”_ Black Star spits, bursting into laughter, but she only gets more serious. “I would do it! For you I’d destroy lunar tides to squish your parents!!”

“You are a true friend,” he says, chuckling. 

“...Stellar?”

Black Star tilts his head at that, though it doesn’t stop her from running her fingers through his hair. “Way more. Cosmic,” he says, and gods do blush just a bit when she beams like a supernova. 

The part of him that he’s been trying to strengthen-- the vulnerable thread that wants to gather close what few precious things he has and run away with them to ignore all consequences (which, he’s beginning to think of late, is exactly what had dictated his self-proclaimed disownment of his family)-- makes a motion in his chest, urging him to do things he knows a strong person wouldn’t do, like take even more advantage of Maka’s bottomless kindness, or kiss her when she’s not sober, or promise her he’ll never leave.

He should go. Black Star makes to stand up, and her hand falls out of his hair for a moment only to grasp the front of his shirt and gently tug him forward. He could easily resist, but he also very much _can’t_ , and he braces his weight with his hands on either side of her. 

This is the logical time Fred would go berserk or her dad would walk in a day early, but logic has left the building, and Maka Albarn gives him a sweet kiss on the lips.

“I never hated you,” she says sleepily.

Eyes wide, he replies, “I-I believe you.” 

She releases his shirt, relaxing further into the pillows with a satisfied curve to her lips. She closes her eyes and murmurs, “I love you a lot, stupid.”


	5. (ANNOYED BEEP)

Sometime after a shower that brings a small amount of life to her otherwise alcohol-rotted body, she realizes she’s been quietly tiptoeing for no reason, because Black Star isn’t downstairs trying to sleep, anymore.

Her heart takes a brief nosedive at this realization, but she has more important matters to address-- namely the amount of groceries she needs to buy for the Fredzilla orders she’s accumulated, or how the balls she got home last night, because the last thing she remembers are fajita nachos.

Because she doesn’t recall Fred waking the dead with his various alarms, she assumes nothing horrifically stupid had occurred, but she _does_ remember becoming a deranged motormouth at dinner, and she could only have gone downhill from there.

Maka slogs down the stairs in desperate need of anything with caffeine or salt. On her way down, she nearly trips on the last step-- Papa is looming in the kitchen, a frown deeply etched in his five-o’clock-shadowed face. 

And on the floor next to the refrigerator is Black Star, petting the kitten in the box. 

And perched on Black Star’s head is Fred.

Gruffly, Papa demands, “How did you bypass the alarm?”

In order to not jostle the bird, Black Star shrugs cautiously, replying, “Guess I’m not a fucko?”

\\\

It isn’t until lunch break that Spirit gives up chaperoning the pet shop to keep an eye on the new employee-who-had-abandoned-his-daughter-at-age-nine-and-a-half, and he grudgingly announces he will get something to eat and recuperate from jet lag. But not before praising Maka for her work with the new dog food. “And so many adoptions! I’m so proud of you, warrior daughter,” he says with a crushing dad-hug before finally going inside the house.

Maka tends to forget how much his approval actually means to her, and having it chases some of her hangover away. Some. The remainder makes her gingerly lean over the register counter to ask Black Star, “So, about last night--”

He’s down an aisle, out of sight, and Maka hears a metallic crash and clatter, Black Star saying, **“Balls,”** and all of which followed by the contents of the dog toy clearance basket rolling out of the aisle. There’s a few errant squeaks as he walks into view, which makes the puppies in their playpen yap excitedly. “What about last night?” he asks, trying to pick up all the bouncy balls.

“I’m really sorry?”

Arms full of toys, he stands up straight and stares at her with a sudden sobriety that catches her off-guard. “...What for?”

She makes a nervous almost-laugh. “It’s a blanket apology, I remember I talked a lot but I don’t really remember? How did we even get home?”

For one bizarre moment, Black Star opens his mouth and nothing comes out. “Maks, you had _an_ drink.”

“I regret every drop.”

“Hahah-- wow, okay,” he says, turning around and kicking straggler toys back down the aisle and disappearing after them. The puppies are very disappointed. “I don’t regret it-- you said some pretty great things, yanno?”

Maka squints, her head doing the hungover thing at full force once more. “Whatever I said, please forget it forever, I’m sure it was _stupid_ \--”

There’s more squeaking. “For starters, you said you were gonna summon the moon to squish my parents.”

_“What?_ Bullshit. ... **Squish??** ” 

“Fact. I’m not nerdy enough to come up with things like ‘destroying lunar tides’.”

“Ah--” Maka slowly presses her face into the counter. “Oh my god.”

The sounds of squeaky toys finally stop, the ballvalanche restored to its rightful place. “Yeah, it’s like the second-nicest thing you ever said to me!”

Her her long sigh fogs up the countertop. “Wait,” she says, her head popping back up, “what was the first-nicest thing?”

Black Star wears the most shit-eatingest grin when he exits the aisle. “I’m not tellin’. Punishment for forgetting, dude.”

“What did I doooooo,” she wails, and Fred, tucked under her apron, changes positions and makes an annoyed beep. “Did I say I liked your hair? Because, sure it’s growing on me a little, but it’s still stupid!”

He crosses his arms and openly laughs. “That’s the third-nicest. You seriously don’t remember?”

“The last thing I remember was like… cooking parties? Oh and monster trucks!” She bites her lip, trying to think. “Oh, I guess we talked about Papa.”

Spirit opens the back door and says, “What about me?”

Before Black Star can comment about eavesdropping, Maka says, “Just about how weird you are,” which, given her foggy memory, she thinks is _probably_ true. Things became nachos after that. 

Papa pouts, but it’s short lived. He holds up one of the Ziplock containers of Fredzilla meatloaf he’d found in the fridge. “Is it alright if I eat this?”

“I mean, _technically--”_

“You’re the best, pumpkin!” He turns back into the house, pulling the door behind him. “Papa hasn’t eaten since yesterday.”

Maka scrambles off her chair. “No! Wait, Dad, that’s not-- hhhhhhhh!” She chases after him, Black Star’s cackling fading behind her.

She catches Spirit just as he’s opening the microwave. Making anxious dinosaur noises, she gently takes the container out of his hands. “Nonononono, this is dog food, Dad.” 

His empty hands still held out, he says, “Oh! I’m sorry. ...That’s too bad, it smelled pretty good.”

Maka laughs, hunting down the lid and snapping it back on. “I haven’t graduated to people-food yet. There’s still some fresh-leftover pizza though.”

He’s clearly starving-- he makes a noise like she’s offering a three-course meal and dives deeper into the questionable back-alleys of the refrigerator. His right arm comes out and reaches blindly towards her. “I can put it back. Can’t waste your important inventory!”

She hands him the container. “Umm, hey Papa?” she asks, shifting from foot to foot. Between Soul and Black Star’s advice, she decides she needs to get this over with, not just for her sake, but her father’s as well. “ _Not right now,_ but, um, can we talk later tonight? Maybe over dinner?”

Spirit hits his head on the little button for the interior light in his rush to stand, causing a mini light-show inside. “Just you and me?” he asks, holding a pizza box.

“Yep.” In an attempt to hide her nervousness, she opens the box and steals a slice. “Is that cool?”

He gives her a big goofy grin, saying, “Yes, very cool, we can talk about anything you wanna discuss, sweetheart.”

\\\

Only because Tsubaki has been beside him for the past three years, Black Star picks up on her unusually subdued mood when she walks into the the shop on her day off. She’s exchanged the suit for a flowery, summery dress, which has all the customers and animals in the store enthralled, but he knows better. 

She only dresses up when she’s feeling down or visiting Liz, which coincide as of late. Maka doesn’t notice, though, cheerfully greeting her from the counter. 

“I didn’t expect you to come here on the weekend!” she says, and okay-- her voice is edging close to _too_ bright, so maybe she does notice things after all. “No part-time job today?”

Tsubaki flashes a quick smile, folding her hands neatly in front of her. “Ah... my shift is already finished,” she says. She glances around and finds Black Star cleaning out gerbil cages. “Sir.”

“Sup, Tsu,” he says, going back to work. He doesn’t know why she’s here, but if she had come to talk to him, she would have walked to him instead of Maka. 

“I was wondering,” she quietly asks Maks, “if there was any way I could reserve Thugnificent for adoption? I apologize that Black Star and I have neglected finding her a foster home this long, but I truthfully wanted her for myself.”

Maka laughs, leaning over to one side to access a filing cabinet behind the counter. “I was wondering, but I also thought you guys said you didn’t have a place for her....” She pauses with an adoption folder, looking back up at Tsubaki. “What do you mean by ‘reserve’?”

Black Star’s bodyguard knots her fingers together, twisting them. “I still don’t have a place to keep her, but I’m hoping-- gambling, really-- that I can get a place with my partner soon. But I was afraid you would sell Thugnificent before then, so… I came to ask.” She blushes, and the poor sap in the scratching post and catnip aisle loses his heart to a very loyal lesbian. Scrunching her eyes shut, Tsubaki hurriedly adds, “But I totally understand if that’s out of the question!”

“I’m sure we can figure something out,” Maka says, waving her hands in reassurance. She gives her best encouraging smile. “I do have one condition though. You’ll have to help me find a good cat food recipe for the Fredzilla line.”

The way the two of them giggle at each other is so cute he could get cute-poisoning.

“How soon is ‘soon’, do you think?” asks Maka.

At this, Black Star pauses in his cage cleaning, listening carefully. For Tsubaki to move in with her girlfriend, prep for the operation must nearly be complete, which is kind of a big deal-- it was the entire reason she applied to be his bodyguard when he left Parallax. His running away had allowed her a certain amount of freedom.

“Sooner rather than later.” She looks back over at him, and her game face is back, unhindered by her casual wear. Tsubaki says, ”Wheels are acquired, sir. Now just looking for a foot in the door, which is the other reason why I have come.”

Black Star dusts off his hands, glancing at Maka, who is confused but attentive. Tsu wouldn’t bring up work in front of her if it didn’t involve her somehow, and that doesn’t bode well. “Alright then.”

Tsubaki unlaces her fingers and puts her hands behind her back, at attention. “I’d normally wait until I was on the clock, but I have a message. The madam has issued her ultimatum: come back home and resume your duties as heir, or Parallax will come down on the Albarns, the shop, and the Fredzilla brand.”


	6. BYE, CUTIE

He’s been doing a lot of pushups lately.

Several days had passed since Tsubaki delivered his mother’s message, and they went by about as normally as days filled with bird-sirens, escaped rabbits, pet food label stickers that never stick, and mounds of buy-one-get-one heads of cauliflower can go. If there was any noticeable change since Mom’s ultimatum, he would say Maka and her old man have been _disgustingly_ buddy-buddy since they had their dinner-talk together, and that Maka keeps glancing at Black Star now and then as if she expects him to take off without saying anything.

First off, that is _stupid--_ he was nine last time, with no autonomy. He gets it though. They’d been apart longer than they’d been together, and somebody had obviously sabotaged all his attempts to contact her in the interim. She has every right to be wary, but it still hurts. 

And then there’s the matter of his wavering resolve, because he’d sworn to never go back to Parallax, even if his life depended on it. But Sid got fired, Mira’s been hit with a lawsuit for violating a noncompete clause in her contract by making ads for a different pet food company, and Tsubaki keeps bringing in news of more people getting fired from Parallax every morning.

Meanwhile, as the people from the company he’s supposed to be running are losing their jobs, he’s here with Pam, Vicki, and Richard in puppy heaven. So he does pushups. It’s a god’s way of pacing around in circles, but with sick gains.

It’s time for him to go to work, though. Black Star’s scumbag-senses are tingling, and he knows his parents will make a move sooner or later. Tsubaki is waiting outside his door, as usual, and follows him on foot to the Barnyard. 

Parked by the curb is Kid’s familiar sedan, as well as some kind of generic white coupe with an official-looking acronym painted on the side, which Tsubaki identifies as animal feed control.

Inside, Maka is doing the glittering intimidation thing with her eyes at some guy in a dated windbreaker with the same acronym on the back. She and Kid are standing behind the register, and Kid places a thick manila folder on the counter, straightening it neatly. Maka then slams her hand on it. “You think I’m fresh off the line? That I don’t know how business licenses work? I have all the information right here-- you’ll have to try harder than this, _fucko.”_

Tsubaki raises a hand over her mouth in stoic surprise.

“As I said,” the official grits out, “there’s nothing on file regarding your business or manufacture of commercial feed--”

 **“My ass!”** Maka rants, looking like she’s about to climb over the counter to tackle him.

Calmer than a tranquilized sloth, Kid butts in with, “I will happily call your supervisor right now to see if they could find our files. I’m sure they’d love to know how much you were bribed to shut us down without authorization.”

The guy makes a show of picking up the folder and flipping through its contents, but he’s not reading any of it. He tosses it back to the counter. “Sorry for the misunderstanding,” the man says, lacking any kind of sincerity, and brushes between Black Star and Tsubaki on his way out the door.

Once he’s gone, Maka spews a combination of cheers, jeers, and cringe-worthy expletives, which Fred repeats with moderate accuracy from under her apron. Then she deflates, melting over the register. “Thanks for the help, Kid. I totally forgot about the purchase records.”

Kid picks up the discarded file and fans himself with it, though he doesn’t seem to be sweating at all, as composed as ever. “By the way I’m now your sales manager, at least on paper.” Then, looking up at the door, says, “Good morning.”

“Busy morning already,” Black Star remarks, fetching his apron and doing his best not to drop to the floor and do another set of pushups. 

Picking a rabbit out of the petting pen, Tsubaki says, “That man works for Parallax. Or did at one point.”

Black Star sighs between his teeth. Then he realizes he’d _let himself sigh._ “I’ll be right back,” he says, retreating to the cat litter display and starting set three for the day.

“Does he do this often?” Kid asks.

He expects Tsubaki to answer, but it’s Maka who speaks up, instead. “He’s thinking really hard about something,” she quietly replies.

Uhg. He needs to be stronger than this if she can read him as easily now as when they were _nine._

\\\

Maka angrily scrubs sweet potatoes.

Shitbags are coming out of the woodwork, and she is in a fluctuating state between **destroy everyone** and Don’t Make A Scene Because Black Star Will Take The Fall And Disappear For Probably Ever.

It’s a mess. Black Star bickers with her dad, stays late to help with cooking parties, takes care of Thugnificent, and is always trying to make her laugh or blush or both-- but whenever his family is mentioned, or another attempt to shut down the pet food business appears, his jokes ring hollow, and his warm grins go cool and brittle. 

As good as he looks doing pushups-- and as entertaining Fred and the rest of the bird brigade are, landing on him to tweet him on-- it’s clear to her that he’s troubled, and every incident involving Parallax just makes him more redundantly swole.

She scrubs the potatoes and doesn’t know what she wants more: to get the courage to kiss him until he gives up the pushups or to tell him to take care of what he’s worrying about and just _go,_ because every time Sid and Mira drop in, he drags them aside and asks quiet questions only to get answers that never seems to reassure him.

She’s scrubbed the skin clear off this potato.

“That’s fucking messed up, though,” Black Star says to Spirit, the two of them sitting behind her at the kitchen table.

She hears Papa leaning back in his chair, still reading the smear campaign regarding his bisexuality that had been printed into the latest Connect magazine. And though the Association of Zoos and Aquariums had personally apologized to him, assuring him they do not know how such a thing had made it past the editors, Spirit had already had a few seminars cancelled on him.

“This isn’t the first time people have given me hell for this, don’t worry.” He turns a magazine page. “They’ll have to try harder than this to shake us-- right, warrior-daughter?”

Maka realizes she’s white-knuckled around the vegetable scrubby brush. She forces her hand to relax, and once she’s certain she’s in control of her voice, she cheerily replies, “Right!”

Only silence follows.

“Don’t make such a serious face,” Papa tells Black Star, and she wants so badly to turn around and look. “Even if Parallax came at us for the next hundred years, we’d be fine. Albarns are stubborn.”

But, as it turns out three days later, so is Parallax.

\\\

Black Star lounges on the park bench, head falling off the back rest as he stares at the sky. The moon won’t rise for a while yet, and it feels like they’ve been abandoned.

A few yards away, Maks continues to stomp on one of the gnarled roots of The Tree, roaring, _“I SHOULD’VE BROKEN HIS NOSE TWELVE MORE TIMES!!”_

Owner of broken nose being Giriko, recently hired by Parallax as a VIP limo driver, and the one coming up with the incriminating sob story painting Maka Albarn as a violent pet shop owner who beats employees, treats the birds so poorly they have anxiety, and feeds puppies rotten dog food.

_“I’M NOT THE OWNER! I’M THE MANAGER!!”_

A middle-of-the-night meeting of weird-ass skillsets has convened in the tiny park across the street, made up by: a pet food chef, runaway heir, modern ninja, modern ninja’s girlfriend’s little news-reporter-sister, and a math nerd who considers cufflinks ‘business casual’.

“I’ve already scheduled ya for a behind-the-scenes surprise visit interview, so people can see yer not satanic,” says Patricia Thompson, aforementioned little sister, scrolling rapidly through news feeds on her phone.

“That will help a lot,” says Kid, “though the damage is done already.”

Maka keeps grunting and stomping, and The Tree rattles with her heretofore bottled rage. He’s actually a little relieved-- her fake cheeriness was the subject of at least two-dozen pushup sets.

Tsubaki says, “I lost count how many calls we got from ‘passionate’ exotic bird owners prepared with death threats.”

“We just need a little more time,” Kid sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Finally giving up the tree murder, Maka catches her breath and asks, “Time for _what?_ ”

“Tsubaki has asked me for assistance.” Kid looks at the space left on the park bench, but clearly does not desire to get his suit dirty and remains standing. “My father has a law firm, and despite my not agreeing with some of their practices, they’ve been been trying to pin anything on Parallax for the past twenty years, and I’ve been digging around.” 

_This_ is news to Black Star, and he tilts his chin back down to look at Tsubaki. He raises an eyebrow. 

Somewhat bashful, she says, “We’ve been trying to find a way to stop them without you having to return, sir.”

“That’s awesome!” Patti says. “Do you guys actually have anything on them?”

Kid meticulously straightens his cufflinks. “...Hence the more time.”

“Oh.”

Black Star takes a breath, ready to bite the bullet and offer the obvious solution, because watching Maka and her Dad suffer because of _him_ is his least favorite activity. But when he opens his mouth, Maka immediately points a finger at him and says, “Shut up!”

“...B--”

“No! _This will blow over,_ ” she insists. “Patti’s interview will get us back on track, and we’ll get whatever we need to get so we can **crush every bone they have** , and you won’t have to be their next sith lord, so don’t even think about it!”

Having nothing to say to that, Black Star sits in silence, stunned by everyone nodding in agreement. 

Still on an anger high, Maka aggressively says, “And thanks to all of you for coming! You didn’t have to do any of this--”

Kid does that thing where he talks over her, but it’s poignant enough to not cause damage. “Maka, whether you meant to or not, you rallied us to a cause and we believe in it. You’re stuck with us.”

The meeting is eventually adjourned with no immediate solution, and without Black Star having said anything at all.

\\\

The truth is, he’s already made up his mind. Watching her persevere despite everything his family throws at hers makes that easy enough. And listening to her remind her father that he needs to start training someone to take her place as the pet shop’s manager just seals the deal in permanent glitter-sharpie.

He wonders when he’d gone from being dead-set on never going back to constantly trying to _convince_ himself to not go. Not to say he doesn’t appreciate the gang for working around the clock to help the business and save him a trip, but gods do not do anything but face things directly, and Blake “Black Star” Strickland feels he ought to get with the program on an immediate kind of timeline, starting first and foremost with Maka.

The news crew has already left, the interview having gone as swimmingly as one could hope, and Maka is humming something off-key while packing the latest order of dog food in plastic containers.

...Okay, this isn’t as head-on as he ought to be. Spirit is out drinking with Stein, Tsubaki is taking eight dogs on a walk before bed, and Maka is facing the stove and still doesn’t remember kissing him.

Also, he hasn’t told her his decision, which is probably scumbaggy of him, because he says to her back: “I really like you, Maka. You wanna go out with me?”

Because he wants to know. Had that kiss just been drunk affection leftover from when they were nine? Would she love him if she knew he was leaving again? Does she even love him half as much as he loves her?

Maka does her best impression of a marble statue. It’s convincing; she’s very talented. 

Finally, she turns around, giving him a smile he doesn’t know. “You’re the brightest star in my life,” she says. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don't see you that way,” she says.

Ah, shit. He’s made her cry. Wasn’t he supposed to be stronger than this?

\\\

Standing up from the table in a rush, Black Star holds up both his hands in easygoing peace. “Okay,” he says, backing up a step. Backing down. Backing away. It’s _wrong._ “I understand,” he adds, though she knows there’s no way he does.

He throws his arms behind his head, face filled with apology when she wipes her eyes dry. Sensing her distress, Fred flies into the kitchen and lands on top of the refrigerator, whistling TV advertisements. 

“Welp,” says Black Star. “It was worth a shot!”

It’s the most upbeat thing he’s said since she’d been slandered by Parallax, and it startles a watery laugh out of her. “I-it wouldn’t have worked out, anyway,” she says, turning back around to finish packing up the last batch of food and bringing a stack of filled containers over to the table to begin labeling them. 

“Yeah? Why’s that?” he asks, as teasing and natural as always. He’s still standing, so it makes sitting down awkward, but if she doesn’t busy herself with something she really will burst into tears.

“Well, ‘cause you’re going back, aren’t you?”

At his silence, Maka hazards a glance. Black Star’s arms slowly come back down, his eyebrows raised high. 

Wryly, she says, “You’ve been doing pushups for nearly a week.”

“I… coulda just been upping my gains, though?”

“Star, I can read you like a book.”

He looks at her and shakes his head, and for just a blink she sees the softest smile she’s ever seen. “You really do know me the best.” Black Star grabs the chair he’d been using, turning it around and straddling it. He folds his arms over the backrest and says, “I don’t want to leave.”

Maka returns to the dog food labels, concentrating on the glitter-marker like her life depends on it. “I don’t want you to, either,” she admits.

“But I gotta.”

She nods, trying to swallow around the rock in her throat. Writes the date on the lid of a container. Says, “I know. I know how much you care about the people still working there. You _have_ to go.”

“...You crying?”

Yes. “ **No** ,” she says, wiping her face with the yanked-up collar of her shirt. 

Black Star makes a noise through his nose that sounds suspiciously like a sigh. “I really _did_ abandon them, this time,” he murmurs. “The company is my responsibility. But listen Maka: _so is the shop.”_

She looks back up at this, locked by his eyes, and this time what he says in his gaze is spoken aloud. “This place was more a home to me than Parallax ever was. So I gotta go bureaucratically punch my dad in the face.”

“God damn it,” she says, because he’s always, always making her laugh, and it is wretched to feel happiness and misery simultaneously. “Please strangle any guilty parties with red tape.”

He impersonates every smarmy politician that’s ever existed, wearing a crooked smile and replying, “Guaranteed,” which makes her choke out another laugh.

After a moment, he shifts into something more serious, and says, “This doesn’t change anything between you and me, got it?”

She closes her eyes-- he’s really leaving. “Got it.” Hearing him move, she opens her eyes to see him reach across the table.

“Fistbump me,” he says.

She does. The brief instant of contact leaves her fingers warm long after.

“We’re cosmic bros for life,” he says, pulling away and standing up once again.

High praise, from him. She watches him turn the chair around again, pushing it neatly under the table. He says, “The sooner I go, the sooner they’ll stop harassing you and Pops, so I’ll see you around, Shortbarn.”

Fist still closed, clenching atop the table, Maka nails a smile to her face with brute force. “Good luck, Star.”

He glances up to the fridge. “Later, Fred,” he says with a salute.

“Bye cutie!”

He’s laughing as he turns around, letting himself out the front door. 

There it is. The shooting star disappearing into the dark. She makes a wish, but the door closes.

Much like his initial arrival, his departure doesn’t feel real, and Maka sits at the kitchen table in a deafening silence, the stack of dog food containers looking foreign and unencouraging. She sniffles.

Fred glides down to the table, whistling for her attention. “Hey pretty bird.”

“Hey, pretty bird,” she parrots back. She offers Fred her still-closed hand. “Fistbump?”

Her eyes water when the bird pats her gently with a foot.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Fred walks up her arm to settle on her shoulder, and Maka, feeling over-abundantly pathetic, asks, “Can I have kisses?” The cockatoo makes a loud smooching noise and bops her on the nose with his beak.

And then, imitating her voice, Fred says, “I never hated you.”

Maka wipes at her eyes, craning her neck back to look at him in surprise. “What?”

“I love you a lot, stupid.”

Her hand unfurls, floating up from the table until her fingers are touching her lips. 

She nearly remembers it-- the darkness of her room, the texture of his shirt in her hand as she’d dragged him forward-- and her tears flow unhindered now, because that hadn’t been the first time Black Star had called her ‘cosmic’. 

She’s openly snot-crying at the table, and this is how Spirit finds her when he returns from the bar. He doesn’t even manage to get her name out, just tosses his jacket on the table and gently moves Fred from her shoulder to the back of her chair. He quickly envelops her in a hug, pressing her protectively into his chest. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

Maka tries to explain, but only manages an ugly sob.

“Who do I need to destroy?”

“ _ **ME**_ ,” she wails, clenching her eyes shut. “I did something horrible, Dad! And he just said ‘Okay’?? How is that okay? He knew the whole time, b-but he just lets it go?” She chokes, trying to catch her breath and cry at the same time. “I didn’t lie for _his sake_ , I l-lied ‘cause--” and then she’s crying too hard to finish.

But the bottom line is: she’s a coward.


	7. USURPER

He’s walking to the apartment, making a mental list of things that need to be done before he hitchhikes back to headquarters, when Tsubaki emerges from the shadows. She’s forgotten about the belt-clip of dog poop bags still attached to her suit in her rush to catch up.

“Sir. I know you made explicitly clear when I signed my contract with you that you did not want to return to Parallax under any circumstances… But I believe you would be an ideal foot-in-the-door, pardon me for saying.”

Black Star throws an arm across his chest, stretching out his pushup-sore shoulder. “Good timing as usual, Tsu. I’ve already decided to fill the position.”

Her footsteps cease, stunned on the sidewalk. “Thank you, sir.”

Looking over his shoulder at her, he says, “You can quit callin’ me sir now, considering the shenanigans we’re about to pull. Get the wheels. Let’s mosey.”

\\\

Soul was wrong. It wasn’t that she was afraid of bothering others with her feelings-- she was simply afraid of losing and getting hurt. Maka had only ever been conveniently framing things with ‘what’s best for others’ to keep herself safe, even if it meant her own unhappiness.

She has to tell Black Star. Even if he never comes back, even if he becomes the next sith lord and decides he really doesn’t want anything to do with her, Papa, Fred, Martha, Sandra, Cheryl, Bob, Cindy, Pam, Vicki, Richard, or Thugnificent ever again, he deserves to know the truth. 

Before the sun is even up, she’s scoured the phonebook and the internet for every phone number associated with Parallax, calling in hopes of finding him. Most return automated answering machine loops, though some numbers reached sleepy employees who didn’t give a damn, and also those who seemed genuinely concerned about the heir’s whereabouts. She even calls Sid, but he hasn’t heard from Black Star since his and Mira’s last petshop visit.

But the sun comes, and Black Star seems to have completely vanished, as well as his weekday-only bodyguard. Their combined absence is made more apparent by Patti knocking on the door at seven, sharp, to take care of Thugnificent. 

Patti doesn’t know what to do, though, so Maka spends some time working with her and the kitten while Papa opens up the shop. 

“Do you know if Tsu will still adopt the kitten?”

“She’ll be back, she’s just real busy right now,” Patti says, twirling a shoelace around Thugnificent and baiting her to chase it. “I dunno if anyone told ya, but my sis, Tsu’s girlfriend? She’s in prison.”

Maka looks up in shock, unsure of how to handle that level of non sequitur.

Patti smiles, but it’s a little bit like a feral alley cat. “Sis was working undercover at Parallax, and was writing an article to expose them for all the fraud and blackmail, blah blah blah. They caught her though, and framed her for hardcore embezzlement. She’s been in prison for three years.”

Only after Fred repeats what comes out of her mouth does Maka realizes she’s dropped three F-bombs and called the company one giant, steaming asshole. 

The reporter gets a good laugh out of it. “Anyway, before that all went down, she met Tsu and they started goin’ out. When Sis got framed, Tsu applied to be Black Star’s bodyguard, ‘cause by then he was already trying to escape like, once a week, and his mom wanted to keep tabs on him. Tsu and B-Star made a deal that if she helped him get out, he’d help her prove Lizzy’s innocence, since being away from headquarters gave them freedom to poke around.”

Heart racing, Maka stands up, one hand on the refrigerator to ground herself because all that random talk about ‘wheels’ and ‘foots in doors’ had seemed like a comedy schtick, but now suddenly doesn’t. “Is… is that what they’re doing? Right _now?_ ”

Patti drags the shoelace across the floor, the kitten skidding across the kitchen tile to attack it. “Lizzy was _extra_ excited the last time I saw her, so… most likely, hehe.” 

“Is there anything we can do to help??”

The woman pauses, slowly looking up with wide eyes. “You’d want to?”

Maka snorts, throwing her shoulders back. “Who **wouldn’t**? Uhg, I want to _feed them all to sharks!!”_

“I like how you think,” Patti says, her eyes scrunching shut as she giggles. “I don’t know how we can, though. Tsu wouldn’t tell me anything about ‘the mission’, so it’s prolly safe to assume it’s nine kinds of illegal.”

Grimacing, Maka de-puffs her anger-feathers. Illegal did seem to be Tsubaki’s M.O; she still can’t get over that literal bag of money. “Still, there has to be _something_ we can do.” She strides over to the telephone, dialing Kid’s number-- if anyone can help, it’d be him.

He doesn’t pick up, the call going uncharacteristically straight to voicemail.

“Where the hell **is** everyone!” shouts Maka.

\\\

He figures he may as well get one last good use out of the Armani, though it’s a little too small for him now, in the shoulders. Hair freshly blue from a kit Tsubaki had pinched from CVS, Black Star strides into the board meeting, Giriko taking no time to block his exit.

Mom and Dad sit at opposite ends of the oval conference table like complimentary scumbag bookends. “Are you finally ready to resume your duties to the company, Blake?” his father asks, the question mark at the end just a formality. 

The other members of the board look at him, expectant. Black Star replies, “I am, though I have two conditions for my cooperation.”

Looking as though she would sooner shop at Target than humor any more of his whims, Mom taps the ashes from her cigarette into a crystal tray. “And your conditions are?”

“Before you both retire, you will legitimize every branch of Parallax until all business practices are properly regulated under commercial law.” Then he points a thumb behind him. “And you fire that shitbag over there.”

Not that any of the board members would dare say anything out of turn to begin with, but the silence after his declaration takes on a new level of deathly.

Then Mom leans back in her leather office chair and _guffaws._

Meanwhile, Dad looks like his ulcers are acting up again. “Do you even understand half the words that just came out of your mouth?” he growls, his wife clutching at her stomach as she continues to laugh.

Black Star shrugs. “Long story short, I want you to clean up the company.”

His mother dabs tears from her eyes, still composing herself as she says, “We trained you for a long time, but we’re not so old as to be incapable of finding someone else to take your place. And if we refuse? What do you think you could possibly do?”

With a broad grin, he channels Maka and her fiery eyes. “You taught me all the tricks of the trade, so… I’ll leave that up to your imagination.” 

Mom slaps her hand on the conference table. Now thoroughly unamused, her voice dips low and slithering. “ **Sit down.** If you care about that middle-class beast-woman at all, you will forget everything you’ve just said and never mention any of it again.”

“So… you won’t be firing him, then.”

He dodges the ashtray she flings at him as Dad says, exasperated, “Get out. Giriko, take him back to the residence.” He waves vaguely in the driver’s general direction, and now Black Star has a new babysitter. Perfect.

“Hey, loser,” Giriko greets on the way out. He leads him through the corporate office hallways and down to the parking garage. He’s already made himself nice and cozy here, with all those security badges.

Black Star gestures at the man’s nose, recently worked on. “Sometimes, I hear it’s better to just ‘give up’, yanno?”

“Get fucked,” Giriko replies, stopping at the limo in the VIP space. “And get in the car.”

“In that order, or…?” Black Star waits patiently until the driver sighs and opens the door for him. “It was an honest question!”

Giriko slams the door, lighting a cigarette as he walks around the car and gets in the driver’s seat. “So. How’s birdbitch?” he asks, starting the engine.

 _Whoa there,_ his vision had gone red there for a second. Gods clench their fists in self-restrained fury. “I dunno,” Black Star replies. “Are drivers supposed to be this chatty?”

Wrong answer. “Hah! Look, all that shit on the news? That was nothin’ personal. Just business.” He pulls out of the parking garage, turning onto the highway access road. “So no hard feelings-- seeing as you were buckass naked that night, I figure you’re tapping that.”

If he keeps talking about Maka like that, Black Star is going to pick up where she left off on his face. Luckily, they’ve made it far enough down the road to begin phase two. Giriko whistles, spying a buxom brunette in a floral summer dress waving the car down from the side of the road, her sedan parked awkwardly in the shoulder.

 _“Speaking of which,”_ Giriko says, pulling over. “Now here’s a much finer mark than your petshop nerd.” And he gets out of the car, throwing away the cigarette and swaggering over to the woman with a big friendly smile.

Tsubaki flying drop-kicks him just like Sid taught them.

Unbuckling his seatbelt, Black Star gets out of the limo, digging in Giriko’s ugly blazer for his security badges. “Well, I’m a little early.”

Kid pops out from behind from behind what is actually his sedan, pulling on a fancy pair of driving gloves. “Hiding an unconscious man in broad daylight is less than ideal,” he complains.

“Yeah, well. I thought I’d have to sit through a meeting.” He helps carry Giriko’s legs as he and Kid deposit him in a scraggly bush. “Man I really wanted to break this guy’s face.”

Tsubaki had somehow changed into her dark pantsuit in the fifteen seconds he and Kid had been preoccupied. She puts her hair back up into her customary ponytail. “There’s still some time before mission start-- shall we get dinner?”

“Oh, yeah! Great idea! Let’s get some deep-fried tacos.”

Kid becomes even paler than usual at the thought. “Fried _what?”_

\\\

After a day and a half of getting nowhere on the phone and Kid _still_ missing in action, Maka takes a long lunch break and rides the bus directly to Parallax headquarters wearing her trusty combat boots and a megaphone strapped to her back.

If she can’t find Black Star, she will caw down someone who can.

The driver says, “Good luck out there Miss Albarn,” as she steps off the bus. He waves as he drives off. She’s surprised a stranger knows her name to begin with, but she’s even more surprised when she understands why he’d wished her luck.

Parallax’s corporate offices are spilling with people, the courtyard and parking garages packed with news vehicles and taxis. 

Wedging her way through the crowd, Maka overhears reporters covering variations of the same story: A scandal had cracked Parallax open, the CEOs moving all remaining assets and flying out of the country. Thousands are without jobs, but as Maka inches through the sardine-packed ocean of office workers, it seems the bulk of the unemployed are in high spirits.

“Though the full story is yet to unfurl, officials suggest the missing heir, Blake ‘Black Star’ Stickland, to have aided in exposing the truth behind the company,” Maka hears. It’s Patti Thompson wearing a dazzling smile for the camera. 

‘Missing heir’ doesn’t sound very promising. She can’t find the ground in this crowd, much less a man in an Armani suit in a herd of suits. Maka growls, pushing forward to one of the several flagpoles in the courtyard, scaling it part-way up to get a better view.

There’s no sign of blue hair, but she refuses to give up easily this time. Raising the megaphone, she takes a deep breath and shouts, _“BLACK STARRRR!”_

A shockwave of startled office workers ripples away from her; some of the people annoyed with her racket, but others cheering at the mention of him. She takes another deep breath, and then she hears someone directly below her call out, “Maka Albarn?”

A tall, willowy man whose slacks are an inch too short for him looks up at her, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun. 

“Y-yes! Do you know where Black Star is?” Maka slides down the pole, landing neatly beside him. “...Why does everyone know who I am?”

The man tilts his head to one side, squinting. “Albarn Barnyard, right? You were on the news.”

Oh.

“He’s not here anymore, miss. We’ve been shut down,” he says with a small smile.

“I gathered that much…” She takes another look at the dizzying crowd. “Do you know where he’s gone?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t. However--” The man pulls a thick, battered file folder out of his briefcase and hands it to her. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here, but I was instructed to deliver this to you as soon as possible.”

“T-thank you,” she says, accepting the file, her head spinning. But one glance at its contents makes her gasp-- the postcard on the very top of the stack is dated _today_ , with a shiny new Godzilla stamp. “Uaaahhhh _thank you somuchforyourhelp, Ishouldgetback, bye!”_

Maka sprints through the ocean of suits, hailing the nearest cab driver. 

The postcard, signed with a little black star at the bottom, reads: Think Pops would hire me again?

\\\

This time, Kid finally picks up. 

_“Uhg, **what.”**_

“Uhh…” Maka turns down the volume of her phone, making an apologetic wince to the cab driver through his rearview mirror. “Where have you been?? Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

 _“Do you have any idea why Jack in the Box still hasn’t been labelled as a bioterrorist?”_ he groans back. The last time she’d heard this much emotion from him, he’d been awake for seventy-two hours, debating on switching his major from law to business. _“How do people eat there? I’m dying.”_

“I dunno what you’re talking about, but I’m pretty sure you’re not dying.” Relieved that he hasn’t fallen off the face of the earth, Maka flips through the aging postcards in her lap, looking at all the places Black Star has been, yet still thought of her. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

Kid sighs, the sound echoing as he’s in a bathroom.

“Are you taking a bubble bath again?”

 _“Glitter, unfortunately. Soul sent me something called a ‘bath bomb’? He said it was cool. I believe he deceived me.”_ He doesn’t sound that mad, honestly. “ _Anyway, yes, I have a well-informed idea of what is going on, and I’ve been all over town, being a very intestinally-abused getaway driver.”_

“I… wh--” Maka stares out the passenger window, attempting to make certain she’s heard him correctly. “Um, a _what_?”

She hears a splash, and she imagines a tidal wave of glitter. “ _A getaway driver.”_

That’s what she thought he said. “In your Taurus.”

“ _It’s faster than it looks,”_ he replies, miffed.

Long story short, before Patti’s sister had been imprisoned, she’d stashed a memory card with pivotal evidence on Parallax’s dark-side-doings in a ( _very hideous_ , per Kid) plastic topiary in upper security. Black Star and Tsubaki went to retrieve it, while Kid had been ‘the wheels’.

“ _Which went fine,_ ” he says, splash-splash. “ _And I drove them out, but those damned tacos! Maka, I had to stop at a **7-Eleven**_ ,” he pauses to audibly shiver, _“and when I came back out, they were both gone, doing whatever bizarre things they do. But, judging by the non-stop news coverage on Parallax, they must’ve cleared Liz’s name by now.”_

By now, Maka has her face pressed into her hand, desperate to understand the words she is hearing. “That all sounds very harrowing, and I’m glad you’re okay, but I’m sorry, I’m still amazed that you’d do something even remotely risky. Also using a family sedan as _a getaway car--”_

 _“Hmph.”_ Splash. _“Well. It was for a good cause. In that situation, who wouldn’t?”_ he says, sounding a whole three percent embarrassed.

Maka looks up, smiling out the window and to the familiar trees of her neighborhood. “Thanks Kid. You’ve helped me and everyone else a lot.”

 _“You’re welcome. Forgive me for not joining the festivities.”_

Festivities? “You’re... excused?” she hazards, and then the cab parks across the street from her house, a crowd gathered around the pet shop. “Uhh… and you’re not dying,” she adds.

 _“Don’t eat the tacos, Maka,”_ he says, hanging up.

After paying the driver, Maka cautiously gets out of the taxi, standing on the moderate patch of grass in the tiny park with its one Tree. Regular customers stream in and out of the shop door, and hanging around on the sidewalk are two-dozen or so other people, some in business suits and others in questionable martial-arts gear (the latter of whom chatting animatedly with Sid and Mira by the shop windows).

Standing a few feet away is Tsubaki, carefully putting Thugnificent into a blond woman’s open hands. “Oh my _gawd,_ ” says Liz, “I love her!”

Maka holds the postcards to her chest and raises the megaphone.

 _“I NEVER HATED YOU,”_ she declares, only to wince because she has scared the people outside the shop, and can hear the animals inside the shop go _beserk._ Oh, Tsubaki is cheerfully waving, though. 

And then Black Star sticks his blue-Fred hair out the door, bright eyes wide and hopeful. “Yeah?!” he shouts across the street.

The megaphone squeals a bit when she replies, “ _YEAH.”_ Maka swallows a nervous lump in her throat, watching him run to her. _“I LOVE YOU A LOT.”_

He moves the megaphone away with a finger, his smile reaching his eyes. “Love you, too.”

“Hey, s-so, you wanna go out?”

Black Star leans in and kisses her.

 

\\\

Maka’s father is waiting for them back in the shop, Fred on his shoulder. He’s frowning like a very put-out pirate. 

“Like I said, just because you’re hired, you’re not automatically a manager. I **never** said--”

Black Star looks back at Maka, and she mirrors back his grin twenty-fold, blushing when he holds up her hand in his. He turns back to Spirit and says, “In front of all these witnesses, I solemnly swear to manage the petshop to the best of my ability--”

“ _Listen_ when people are talking to you!”

The crowd in the shop breaks into laughter. This is when Maka’s phone rings, Godzilla roaring in her pocket. “Kid? Did you actually die?” She pauses, listening. “Um, sure-- Can I get everyone’s attention, please?” she announces, and even the birds and puppies seem to hush this once. She presses a button, Kid appearing in face-time. She holds him up for the people in the shop to see.

_“Attention all former employees of Parallax: I am the sales manager of, ahem, ‘Fredzillas Grubless Grub’. Miss Albarn and I would like to offer all of you employment, should it interest you.”_

As the people in the shop begin a cresting wave of rapid-fire questions-- Maka included-- Black Star looks back at Spirit, catching the man with an open look of pride on his face. 

“Hey, Spirit,” he says through the din, “I’m uh, pursuing your daughter with the intent to marry, so, do you prefer ‘Daddy-o’ or ‘Pops?’ I could also compromise with ‘Com **padre** ’--

“W-wait, what did you just say?” Maka asks.

Spirit Albarn takes one look at Fred and says, “This is mutiny.”

“Papa, _no_ \-- _”_

Fred takes one look at Black Star and says, **“USURPER!”** and launches directly for his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please check out all the artwork ness and uppast did in this post [here!](http://marshofsleep.tumblr.com/post/163633172524/heroic-vulgar)
> 
> Enormous thanks my betas: adorabbey, sahdah, rogha, ahshesgone, madi, and victoriapyrrhi, i could not have finished without yall  
> Also big thanks to: adulterclavis and the GW productivity chat for keeping me sane and getting my ass in gear
> 
> Special thanks to AlmanacComics and Meisterful for their help with Fred's vocabulary


End file.
